Network-Load Aware Adaptive Channel Access Control for WLAN

Wireless local area network (WLAN) brings us a low cost and high bandwidth experience and thus plays a critically important role in current/future networks to support high-rate transmissions. To better provide quality-of-service (QoS) for WLAN users, we in this paper propose an improved scheme called “A-EDCA”(adaptive EDCA), based on enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) of IEEE 802.11e under the infrastructure mode. Our proposed scheme aims at efficiently adapting the transmission over WLAN to the time-varying network conditions and mitigating the competition ability unfairness between access point (AP) and non-AP stations (STAs). Specifically, all non-AP STAs adaptive-ly modify the contention window based on the network condition. Moreover, AP skips the backoff phase by setting its backoff counter as zero when non-AP STA completes transmission successfully to relieve the unfairness. At last, simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.