Improving Quality of Service in IEEE 802.11e Enhanced Distributed Channel Access protocol

Abstract

A new quality of service (QoS) enhancement scheme for IEEE 802.11e Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) protocol is developed. It uses a combination of an adaptive access category (AC) traffic allocation, incorporated into the network's wireless side, and weighted round robin (WRR) queuing scheduling mechanism, incorporated into the wired side of the network. The adaptive traffic allocation algorithm determines the packet arrival rate (PAR) of the up-and down-link traffic for each access category (AC). It then dynamically allocates traffic of a lower priority AC to the next higher AC, when the higher AC is not receiving traffic at the time. WRR shared the network resources, based on the traffic's Quality of Service requirements. The incorporation of the scheme caused an overall reduction of delay by 54.6%, jitter by 32%, and packet loss ratio by 62% for the transmitted applications.