Enhanced HCCA mechanism for multimedia traffics with QoS support in IEEE 802.11e networks

In broadband wireless networks, providing Quality of Service (QoS) support for multimedia traffics is no doubt crucial to many application requirements such as real-time audio and video streaming communications. IEEE 802.11e Medium Access Control (MAC) standard proposes Hybrid Coordination Function (HCF), which is composed of HCF Controlled Channel Access (HCCA) and Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) mechanisms for QoS support. HCCA performs a polling procedure with parameterized channel. However, a station may not always have pending data to transmit. That is, polling all the stations may waste time and therefore deteriorate the transmission performance. In this paper, we propose a modified HCCA mechanism using the beacon frame broadcasted by the AP to determine which station can transmit its pending data so as to improve the transmission performance. The simulation results show that the performance improvement of our proposed mechanism is significant for QoS support particularly under light load condition. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.