Up to the present, several studies have been performed in order to provide prioritization of stations or classes of service for WLAN IEEE 802.11. The IEEE 802.11e draft specification aims to extend the original IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol to support QoS. One of the mechanisms for prioritizing traffic is the assignment of different AIFS times to each priority level. Nevertheless, the AIFSs employed are separated by values that are multiples of the slot time. Therefore, due to the fact that the backoff time counter is slotted, the different priority levels can attempt for transmission simultaneously. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of the IEEE 802.11e when its working procedure is desynchronized: we avoid that stations belonging to different priority levels attempt for transmission at the same time. We assign AIFS times that are separated by values that are not multiples of the slot time, in order to avoid collisions between the different priority levels. We present a mathematical model and simulation results for analyzing the performance of the differentiation mechanism proposed. The results show that it solves the strangulation of low priority traffic, fact that occurs in IEEE 802.11e EDCA. Moreover, this proposal leads to a significant increase in the performance of the system as a whole.

Peer Reviewed