How to use the IEEE 802.11e EDCA Protocol when Dealing with Real-Time Communication

In this paper, the timing behavior of the EDCA mechanism defined in the IEEE 802.11e standard is analyzed. More specifically, the target of this paper is to understand the limitations of the highest priority level of the EDCA mechanism (voice category) when supporting real-time (RT) communication. We show that for most part of the evaluated scenarios, when using the default parameters of the EDCA mechanism both the number of packet losses and the average packet delays forecast an unacceptable number of deadline losses. However, as long as adequate Contention Windows (CW) parameters have been configured in the set of RT stations, it becomes possible to adequately handle RT traffic. As a conclusion of this paper, we present some potential future directions toward improved QoS in wireless networks.