Quality of Service in IEEE 802.11 WLANs: An Experimental Study

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the real-world performance of IEEE 802.11e's EDCA mechanism for traffic prioritization in WLANs, focusing on delay and traffic impact through experimental testing on software-defined networks.

Contribution

It provides an experimental analysis of IEEE 802.11e EDCA parameters' effects on network delay and traffic, validating simulation results with real platform testing.

Findings

EDCA parameters significantly affect network delay

Real-world testing confirms simulation-based insights

Optimizing parameters improves multimedia traffic performance

Abstract

While the IEEE 802.11 protocol is being widely used, it is not specifically designed to handle multimedia traffic, which covers an important portion of the Internet traffic today. Voice and video multicast streaming is inefficient, as there is lack of transmission reliability in such approaches where delay is not guaranteed. In this work, we focus on the performance of Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) mechanism proposed by IEEE 802.11e which provides traffic prioritization and since most of the previous works are done based on simulation results, we test the performance of this protocol in a real platform using sofware Defined Networks. We then validate the impact of different EDCA parameters ( e.g., AIFS and TXOP) by tuning them to see their impact on the delay of the network and eventually on network traffic.