Providing Throughput Guarantees in IEEE 802.11e Wireless LANs

The upcoming new standard IEEE 802.11e aims at providing Quality of Service (QoS) support in 802.11 Wireless LANs. While the QoS mechanisms in 802.11e, namely the EDCF and the HCF, have already been defined in the standard draft, the challenge lies in the configuration of these mechanisms in order to provide the desired services. In this paper, we deal with the configuration of the EDCF in order to provide throughput guarantee services. We derive an analytical model for the throughput performance of an 802.11e Wireless LAN under the EDCF, and, based on this analysis, we propose an admission control and parameter configuration algorithm that (1) provides the committed throughput guarantees; and (2) accepts as many requests as possible. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated via simulation.