Saturation Throughput Analysis of IEEE 802.11e Enhanced Distributed Coordination Function

Abstract

The IEEE 802.11 Task Group E will soon approve the 802.11e standard for medium access control (MAC) layer quality-of-service (QoS) enhancements to the 802.11 protocol, and it is widely believed that these enhancements will allow 802.11 technology to form the foundation of high-bandwidth vertically integrated networks. At the heart of 802.11e is a modified contention-based access mechanism, named the enhanced distributed coordination function (EDCF). In this paper, we propose and validate an analytical model for the saturation throughput of EDCF. Key to the accuracy of our model is a treatment of the postcollision period, which has been ignored by all previous 802.11 models. With results from the ns-2 simulator, we show that our model can accurately predict throughput over a wide range of scenarios, and thereby demonstrate its usefulness as a predictive tool for use in QoS provision. With context provided by our analytical model, we discuss the primary throughput differentiation mechanisms of EDCF.