A Distributed Channel Access Scheme with Guaranteed Priority and Enhanced Fairness

Although the IEEE 802.11e enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) can differentiate high priority traffic such as real-time voice from low priority traffic such as delay- tolerant data, it can only provide statistical priority, and is characterized by inherent short-term unfairness. In this paper, we propose a new distributed channel access scheme through minor modifications to EDCA. Guaranteed priority is provided to real time voice traffic over data traffic, while a certain service time and short-term fairness enhancement are provided to data traffic. We also present analytical models to calculate the percentage of time to serve voice traffic and the achieved data throughput. Both analysis and simulation demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.