An analytical packet/flow-level modelling approach for wireless LANs with quality-of-service support

We present an analytical packet/flow-level modelling approach for the performance analysis of IEEE 802.11e wireless LANs, where we explicitly take into account QoS differentiation mechanisms based on minimum contention window size values and Arbitration InterFrame Space (AIFS) values, as included in the Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) protocol of the 802.11e standard. We first enhance the packet-level approach previously used for best-effort WLANs to include traffic classes with different QoS requirements. The packet-level model approach yields service weights that discriminate among traffic classes. From these observations, the packet/flow-level model for 802.11e is the generalized discriminatory processor-sharing (GDPS) queueing model, where the state-dependent system capacity is distributed among active traffic classes according to state-dependent priority weights. Extensive simulations show that the discriminatory processor-sharing model closely represents the flow behavior of 802.11e.