EDCA-TM: IEEE 802.11e MAC Enhancement for Wireless Multi-hop Networks

In this paper, we propose the EDCA-TM, a new architecture which tunes the enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) for multi-hop networks. In EDCA-TM, we suggest a new module for dynamic access category adaptation (DACA) over the existing channel access mechanism such as EDCA. It processes received data packets for assigning an appropriate access categories (AC) to provide delay and rate guarantee to the QoS traffic. In addition, we adopt the earliest deadline first queuing (EDF) scheme to reschedule buffered packets in the AC queues according to their urgency for actual transmission. We have simulated our proposal in the network simulator, ns-2.31, and compared it with EDCA and APHD. Results show that our schemes outperform existing protocols and provide quality service for the traffic flows within the stated requirements.