Proportional fairness for QoS enhancement in IEEE 802.11e WLANs

In this paper, we study the proportional fairness problem in IEEE 802.11e wireless local area networks (WLANs). With 802.11e EDCA, only priority-based service is supported. Such priority-based service, while allowing differentiated service for flows of different priorities, cannot ensure service amount in proportion to their demands. This calls for weighted fair service to be supported by EDCA. In this paper, we propose a mechanism called weighted fair-EDCA (WF-EDCA) to provide proportional fairness for IEEE 802.11 WLANs. With WF-EDCA, weighted fair service among different access categories (ACs) is provided, and strict priority service can also be implemented. We then conduct simulations based on ns-2 to compare the performance of WF-EDCA and EDCA. The results show that WF-EDCA outperforms EDCA in terms of providing proportional fairness and strict priority service for IEEE 802.11 WLANs while retaining comparable total throughput