Improving fairness and throughput for voice traffic in 802.11e EDCA

Wireless local area networks (WLAN) using IEEE 802.11 technology are expected to become a widespread networking solution to provide both real-time services and data applications. In this paper, we consider a WLAN with infrastructure using the IEEE 802.11e distributed contention-based access scheme, the so-called EDCA. We investigate the EDCA performance in presence of voice and data integrated traffic, and observe the inefficiencies that arise when access differentiation is performed on the basis of traffic type only We then present a solution that improves both fairness and throughput of real-time traffic in WLAN employing EDCA, and we show the benefits of our proposal through some simulation results obtained with ns-2.