Saturation Throughput of IEEE 802.11e EDCA Based on Mean Value Analysis

The IEEE 802.11-based wireless LANs have been widely deployed for local area high-speed data access. The IEEE 802.11e amendment aims at providing QoS provisioning to support real-time multimedia traffic in WLANs. The Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) is a QoS extension of the Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) in IEEE 802.11a/b/g. In this paper, we propose an analytical model to evaluate the saturation throughput of the IEEE 802.11e EDCA. Our analytical model is based on the use of mean value analysis. We carry out extensive simulation study to validate the accuracy of the proposed model. Our scheme models accurately the effects of the change of contention window size and AIFS (Arbitration Inter-Frame Space). Our analytical model is applicable to real-time system tuning and on-line admission control algorithms which require a low computation complexity.