Performance Evaluation of the IEEE 802.11 WLAN Supporting Quality of Service

This paper presents a performance evaluation of a new solution for the support of QoS by IEEE 802.11 WLAN. It aims at the improvement of the Medium Access Control (MAC) by taking into account information from both physical and network layers for packets differentiation scheduling. An analytical model based on stochastic Petri nets representing the dynamics of the new MAC is evaluated. Then, OPNET simulations are carried out based on the new MAC in order to evaluate its performance. Comparison between analytic and simulation results show the interest of our Cross-Layer approach which allows improving or at least keeping the same network performances while supporting Quality of Service.