Extended EDCA for delay guarantees in wireless local area networks

Despite their very broad diffusion, IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) are not able to provide service differentiation and to support real-time multimedia applications, due to their channel access methods. To overcome these limitations, the 802.11e working group has proposed the Enhanced Distributed Coordination Access (EDCA) scheme, which achieves service differentiation on a statistical basis by properly mapping user Quality of Service (QoS) requirements to channel contention parameters. Such a scheme will be included in the emerging 802.11n standard and in the revision of the 802.11 standard. However, it has been widely demonstrated that, especially at high network loads, EDCA does not provide an effective usage of the channel capacity. In particular, it is unable to provide a bounded delay service to all kinds of multimedia flow because flows with lower channel access priorities are starved to advantage only those with the highest priority. To fix this undesired behavior and improve wireless LAN performance, this paper proposes a new Extended EDCA (E2DCA) scheme, that is compliant with 802.11e specifications. By exploiting a closed-loop control algorithm, E2DCA performs a distributed dynamic bandwidth allocation, providing guarantees on average/absolute delays to real-time media flows, regardless of their priorities. Moreover, an innovative Call Admission Control (CAC) procedure has been developed. Using the ns-2 simulator, the effectiveness of the algorithm has been investigated in realistic network scenarios, involving a mix of audio, video, and FTP flows, at several network loads and with random losses. Results have shown that the proposed scheme is able to provide a bounded delay service to multimedia flows in a wide range of network loads and frame loss ratios.