Multimedia Capacity Analysis of the IEEE 802.11e Contention-based Infrastructure Basic Service Set

Abstract: We first propose a simple mathematical analysis framework for the Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) function of the recently ratified IEEE 802.11e standard. Our analysis considers the fact that the distributed random access systems exhibit cyclic behavior. The proposed model is valid for arbitrary assignments of AC-specific Arbitration Interframe Space (AIFS) values and Contention Window (CW) sizes and is the first that considers an arbitrary distribution of active Access Categories (ACs) at the stations. Validating the theoretical results via extensive simulations, we show that the proposed analysis accurately captures the EDCA saturation performance. Next, we propose a framework for multimedia capacity analysis of the EDCA function. We calculate an accurate station- and AC-specific queue utilization ratio by appropriately weighing the service time predictions of the cycle time model for different number of active stations. Based on the calculated queue utilization ratio, we design a simple model-based admission control scheme. We show that the proposed call admission control algorithm maintains satisfactory user-perceived quality for coexisting voice and video connections in an infrastructure BSS and does not present over- or under-admission problems of previously proposed models in the literature.