Saturation throughput analysis of IEEE802.11e contention-based channel access

In this paper, we introduce a saturation throughput analysis of IEEE 802.11e enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) based WLAN under saturation condition. To estimate the wireless channel capacity, we extend a well-known Bianchi model for the multiple access categories (ACs), inner station collision (in other words, virtual collision) handling, and heterogeneous configuration of ACs in the stations. The NS-2 based simulation results show that proposed channel capacity acquisition algorithm can estimate well the available bandwidth in the EDCA-based wireless infrastructure network which has either heterogeneous or homogeneous AC configurations.