Analysis of Packet Throughput and Delay in IEEE 802.11 WLANs with TCP Traffic

Abstract

The IEEE 802.11 standard is a successful
wireless local area networks (WLAN) technology,
because of its easy deployment. With WLAN, the
ability of the IEEE802.11 standard to support
multimedia applications with high quality of service
(QoS) requirements has increased. This paper
evaluates the capability of QoS support in Enhanced
Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) mechanism of the
IEEE 802.11e standard using TCP protocol. The
EDCA is an enhancement for QoS support in 802.11.
EDCA mechanisms allow prioritized medium access
for applications with high QoS requirements by
assigning different priorities to the access categories.
The current work discusses the performance
evaluation of 802.11 and 802.11e by simulations using
TCP protocol. A comparative discussion between DCF
und EDCA with TCP protocol is reported for different
services, such as voice, video, best-effort and
background traffic. Results and simulations show that
the TCP protocol is usable for transferring audio and
video data within special programs and applications.
Moreover, it is shown that the UDP protocol with its
higher performance is more suitable for this task.