Performance Enhancement and Bandwidth Guarantee in IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs

This paper first revisits the previously proposed NSAD (New Self-Adapt DCF) mechanism. Some modifications are presented to further enhance the performance of NSAD in the error-prone environment. Then a new MAC mechanism is proposed that can realize bandwidth guarantee by assigning different self-adapt parameters to users at different priority levels. The bandwidth guarantee property of this new mechanism is analyzed and the high priority users are found to have bandwidth guaranteed even in heavy contention condition, which is proved true not only by theoretical analysis but also by simulation results. At the same time the new scheme keeps the self-adapt character of NSAD, so the overall system utilization is kept very high in heavy contention condition compared with the previously studied DCF-based QoS mechanisms.