| Abstract: | In the IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN (WLAN), the fundamental medium access control (MAC) mechanism—distributed coordination function (DCF), only supports best‐effort service, and is unaware of the quality‐of‐service (QoS). IEEE 802.11e enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) supports service differentiation by differentiating contention parameters. This may introduce the problem of non‐cooperative service differentiation. Hence, an incompletely cooperative EDCA (IC‐EDCA) is proposed in this paper to solve the problem. In IC‐EDCA, each node that is cooperative a priori adjusts its contention parameters (e.g., the contention window (CW)) adaptively to the estimated system state (e.g., the number of competing nodes of each service priority). To implement IC‐EDCA in current WLAN nodes, a frame‐analytic estimation algorithm is presented. Moreover, an analytical model is proposed to analyze the performance of IC‐EDCA under saturation cases. Extensive simulations are also carried out to compare the performances of DCF, EDCA, incompletely cooperative game, and IC‐EDCA, and to evaluate the accuracy of the proposed performance model. The simulation results show that IC‐EDCA performs better than DCF, EDCA, and incompletely cooperative game in terms of system throughput or QoS, and that the proposed analytical model is valid. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
