Experimental evaluation of 802.11e quality of service in a large-scale network

Abstract

IEEE 802.11e is a fairly recent amendment to the IEEE 802.11 WLAN standard that supports quality of service (QoS) (or service differentiation) based on medium-access control (MAC) and contention-based channel access. While prior research has been done regarding the performance of this enhancement, the focus here is on two novel aspects: performance of this standard in a large testbed, and energy consumption of an individual node that relies on this service differentiation. Results demonstrate that to get the best benefits of service prioritization, there should be an even distribution of nodes in each service class to prevent intra-class contention. Furthermore, results also demonstrate the high correlation between energy consumption of a node with its traffic priority class.