Supporting Service Differentiation and Maximizing System Saturation Throughput: A Contradictory in IEEE 802.11e WLAN

While most existing work focuses separately on how to improve WLAN saturation throughout and how to provide differentiated service, few attention is put to study their relationship. In this paper, we investigate the impact of service differentiation on saturation throughput maximization in IEEE 802.11e WLANs and theoretically prove that it is contradictory and impossible to achieve both of them simultaneously. In other words, saturation throughput is maximized without service differentiation or service differentiation reduces the maximal achievable saturation throughput more or less.