A Novel Hybrid Slot Allocation Mechanism for 802.11e EDCA Protocol

This letter proposes a novel Hybrid Slot Allocation Mechanism (HSAM) to solve the high collision problem among four Access Categories (ACs) introduced by IEEE 802.11e EDCA protocol. In the HSAM, three time slots are assembled into a super-slot, each slot in the super slot is allocated to a particular AC according to its priority. The main idea of HSAM is to stagger the transmission slots of different ACs to reduce collisions, while maintaining the service differentiation. Extensive results from simulations have demonstrated good performance of HSAM comparing with EDCA protocol in terms of throughput, packet loss and MAC delay.