Transport of Long-Range Dependent Traffic in Single-Hop and Multi-Hop IEEE 802.11e Networks

Long-range dependence (LRD) is a widely verified property of traffic crossing the wireless LAN radio interface. LRD severely affects network performance yielding longer queuing delays. In this paper, we study how LRD and non-LRD traffic flows influence each other in the IEEE 802.11e wireless access network and their queuing behaviour in downstream schedulers. We consider scenarios with one and two wireless hops. We investigate interaction of traffic flows with the service class separation enabled by the IEEE 802.11e EDCA function, comparing results with those of the basic scenario with a single service class shared by all traffic flows. We find that a partial isolation of service classes is enabled by the IEEE 802.11e access function. However, competing flows exhibit a queuing behavior, in downstream schedulers, which cannot be accounted for by standard LRD traffic descriptors.