A Cross-Layer Approach for WLAN Voice Capacity Planning

This paper presents an analytical approach to determining the maximum number of on/off voice flows that can be supported over a wireless local area network (WLAN), under a quality of service (QoS) constraint the authors consider multiclass distributed coordination function (DCF) based medium access control (MAC) that can provision service differentiation via contention window (CW) differentiation. Each on/off voice flow specifies a stochastic delay bound at the network layer as the QoS requirement. The downlink voice flows are multiplexed at the access point (AP) to alleviate the MAC congestion, where the AP is assigned a smaller CW compared to that of the mobile nodes to guarantee the aggregate downlink throughput. There are six-fold contributions in this paper: 1) a nonsaturated multiclass DCF model is developed; 2) a cross-layer framework is proposed, which integrates the network-layer queueing analysis with the multiclass DCF MAC modeling; 3) the channel busyness ratio control is included in the framework to guarantee the analysis accuracy; 4) the framework is exploited for statistical multiplexing gain analysis, network capacity planning, contention window optimization, and voice traffic rate design; 5) a head-of-line outage dropping (HOD) scheme is integrated with the AP traffic multiplexing to further improve the MAC channel utilization; 6) performance of the proposed cross-layer analysis and the associated applications are validated by extensive computer simulations.