Improving Performance of QoS Applications for Wireless Networks

The contention based medium access method of 802.11 standards is a fundamental cause of poor downlink goodput and high latency over wireless networks, which makes it impossible to provide QoS guarantees. The intensive channel contention leads to the performance degradation. The problem exacerbates when the traffic asymmetry between the uplink and the downlink is present. While prior research works proposed various mechanisms to alleviate the issue, little was done to specifically address the appropriate parameter setting in a real world network. This study presents a way to obtain the appropriate access parameters that improves the performance of QoS applications over wireless networks. In particular, we propose AQEDCA, a traffic-aware minimum contention window adjustment algorithm. We validate our scheme by the extensive real world network tests and the results show that our scheme improves the downlink goodput up to 199.13%, decreases the latency up to 54.77%, and can achieve tight QoS guarantees as compared to the existing schemes.