Providing Service Guarantees in 802.11e EDCA WLANs with Legacy Stations

Although the EDCA access mechanism of the 802.11e standard supports legacy DCF stations, the presence of DCF stations in the WLAN jeopardizes the provisioning of the service guarantees committed to the EDCA stations. The reason is that DCF stations compete with Contention Windows (CWs) that are pred...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Banchs, Albert|||0000-0003-3544-8537, Serrano, Pablo, Vollero, Luca
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2010
País:España
Institución:IMDEA Networks Institute
Repositorio:IMDEA Networks Institute Digital Repository
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:dspace.networks.imdea.org:20.500.12761/232
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12761/232
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Q Science::Q Science (General)
Q Science::QA Mathematics::QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
T Technology::T Technology (General)
T Technology::TA Engineering (General). Civil engineering (General)
T Technology::TK Electrical engineering. Electronics Nuclear engineering
WLAN
802.11
802.11e
EDCA
DCF
ACKS
legacy stations
throughput guarantees
control theory
Descripción
Sumario:Although the EDCA access mechanism of the 802.11e standard supports legacy DCF stations, the presence of DCF stations in the WLAN jeopardizes the provisioning of the service guarantees committed to the EDCA stations. The reason is that DCF stations compete with Contention Windows (CWs) that are predefined and cannot be modified, and as a result, the impact of the DCF stations on the service received by the EDCA stations cannot be controlled. In this paper, we address the problem of providing throughput guarantees to EDCA stations in a WLAN in which EDCA and DCF stations coexist. To this aim, we propose a technique that, implemented at the Access Point (AP), mitigates the impact of DCF stations on EDCA by skipping with a certain probability the Ack reply to a frame from a DCF station. When missing the Ack, the DCF station increases its CW, and thus, our technique allows us to have some control over the CWs of the legacy DCF stations. In our approach, the probability of skipping an Ack frame is dynamically adjusted by means of an adaptive algorithm. This algorithm is based on a widely used controller from classical control theory, namely a Proportional Controller. In order to find an adequate configuration of the controller, we conduct a control-theoretic analysis of the system. Simulation results show that the proposed approach is effective in providing throughput guarantees to EDCA stations in presence of DCF stations.