Design and Evaluation of a High Throughput MAC with QoS Guarantee for Wireless LANs

Abstract

The IEEE 802.11e and the IEEE 802.11n focus on quality of service (QoS) and enhancements for high throughput respectively. Modern wireless LAN (WLAN) products should integrate both features. This paper presents a design of a high throughput MAC with QoS guarantee which combines the Hybrid Coordination Function (HCF) of the 802.11e with the frame aggregation technique in the 802.11n. The basic idea of the design is to improve the throughput of best-effort traffic under the constraint that QoS is just met for real-time traffic. Simulation results show that the proposed MAC has high channel utilization and the delay of best-effort traffic is also reduced.