Throughput analysis of IEEE 802.11e EDCA under heterogeneous traffic

The amended version of IEEE 802.11e defines the enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) for quality of service (QoS) connections. EDCA provides a priority scheme to classify different traffic categories by the arbitration inter-frame space (AIFS), and the initial and maximum contention window sizes. Most previous Markov chain analyses of EDCA have concentrated on the effect of contention window size, they neglected the effect of AIFS. In this paper, we consider of AIFS events among each back-off procedure and evaluate the saturation throughput of the IEEE 802.11e EDCA under heterogeneous traffic scenarios. The analytical model is based on the differentiated AIFS and uses the discrete time slot to analyses the external collision time. We take advantage of extensive simulation studies to validate the accuracy of the proposed model. Our models accurately estimate the effects of varied back-off window size and AIFS under heterogeneous traffic.