• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea TC
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• v.44 no.4
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• pp.17-27
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• 2007

The enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) of IEEE 802.11e has been standardized for supporting Quality of Service (QoS) in wireless LANs. In the EDCA, support of QoS can be achieved statistically by reducing the probability of medium access for lower priority traffics. In other words, it provides statistical channel access rather than deterministically prioritized access to high priority traffic. Therefore, lower priority traffics affect the performance of higher priority traffics. Consequently, at the high loads, the EDCA does not guarantee the QoS of multimedia applications such as voice and video even though it provides higher priority. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective scheme, called deterministic priority channel access (DPCA), for improving the QoS performance of the EDCA mechanism. In order to provide guaranteed priority channel access to multimedia applications, the proposed scheme uses a busy tone for limiting the transmissions of lower priority traffics when higher priority traffic has data packets to send. Performance of the proposed scheme is investigated by numerical analysis and simulation. Our results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the EDCA in terms of throughput, delay, jitter, and drop under a wide range of contention levels.