Throughput Enhancement of IEEE 802.11e WLAN by Transmission Power Randomization

In this paper, we evaluate the effect of power randomization on the saturation throughput of a WLAN comprised of four classes of users, corresponding to four access categories (ACs) of IEEE 802.11e EDCA. To this end, we consider a specific number of power levels for all users. By some simplifications, we find the probability distributions for the power levels at each class in order to optimize the saturation throughput of a specific class. We evaluate the effect of such optimization onto the saturation throughput of other ACs as well as the saturation throughput of the whole network. Finally, we present some numerical results to show the effect of our optimization in different conditions.