IEEE 802.11e capabilities in dense wireless networks

Abstract

The usage of IEEE 802.11 wireless equipment has been growing in recent years. Nevertheless, the spectrum which is used by such equipment is already overcrowded and due to this, the performance of wireless devices is decreasing. Recently, IEEE 802.11 was updated with the latest IEEE 802.11ac version. IEEE 802.11ac provides higher modulation capabilities and more robustness against interference. With the second wave of IEEE 802.11ac chipsets, it is expected to receive MU-MIMO capability and further increased performance. However, the Media Access Control (MAC) layer is hardly changed and still re-uses the same methods for Quality of Service (QoS) and wireless medium access. In this article we will overview the multi-polling solution, which is based on HCF Controlled Channel Access (HCCA) and Enhanced Distributed Coordination Access (EDCA) algorithms. We will show that there exists an optimal value for Wireless Multimedia Extensions (WME), which can increase TCP throughput on high density scenarios. The impact of WME settings is verified by practical experimentations.