Performance and Fairness Analysis of a QoS
Supportive MAC Protocol for Wireless LANs
Thomas D. Lagkas
Department of Informatics and Telecommunications
Engineering
University of Western Macedonia
Kozani, Greece
tlagkas@uowm.gr
Abstract— IEEE 802.11e Enhanced Distributed Channel Access
(EDCA) is developed to provide Wireless Local Area Networks
(WLANs) with Quality of Service (QoS) support. Several
solutions have been proposed in order to provide a fair channel
access for all competing stations. This paper first studies the QoS
capabilities of the Adaptive Weighted and Prioritized Polling
(AWPP) protocol that adopts the frame structure and the basic
polling scheme of the Priority Oriented Adaptive Polling (POAP)
protocol. Our analytical approach is validated by plotting
analytical results against simulation outcome. We then explore
the fairness provision of the AWPP protocol utilizing Jain’s
fairness index. Finally, we provide a comparative performance
analysis between EDCA, POAP and AWPP protocols and we
demonstrate that AWPP outperforms the other two.
Keywords-QoS; fairness; medium access control; WLANs;
IEEE 802.11e; EDCA; adaptive polling
I. INTRODUCTION
IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs)
have been very popular and deployed widely in public and
private areas. The original IEEE 802.11 WLAN standard
defines the Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) that
provides best-effort service at the Medium Access Control
(MAC) layer. However, DCF cannot satisfy the demand for
better Quality of Service (QoS) support for multimedia
applications that have attracted a lot of attention lately in
WLANs. The ratified IEEE 802.11e supplement [1] defines
Hybrid Coordination Function (HCF) in order to provide QoS
and differentiated services among contending stations. HCF
specifies two medium access functions, HCF Controlled
Channel Access (HCCA) and Enhanced Distributed
Contention Channel Access (EDCA) for controlled and
contention-based channel access, respectively. This paper
considers only the mandatory EDCA medium access function.
In the literature, much research effort is focused on MAC
solutions to support different QoS requirements for WLANs
[2]-[8]. In particular, a resource reservation based protocol
capable of guaranteeing QoS is introduced in [2]. Authors in
[3] and [4] enhance and fine tune the parameters of EDCA. An
analytical model for the performance analysis of EDCA that
incorporates the main QoS features of the IEEE 802.11e
standard is proposed in [5]. Work in [6] addresses the problem
of providing throughput guarantees to EDCA stations in a
WLAN with legacy DCF stations by proposing the Dynamic
The published version of this paper is available by IEEE Xplore at:
http://doi.org/10.1109/icc.2011.5963258
Periklis Chatzimisios
CSSN Research Lab
Department of Informatics
Alexander T.E.I. of Thessaloniki
Sindos, Thessaloniki, Greece
pchatzimisios@ieee.org
ACK Skipping (DACKS) technique that includes a
modification in the IEEE 802.11e Access Point (AP).
However, none of the previous works studies fairness
combined with performance taking into account the QoS
support. Work in [7] and [8] investigates the issue of fairness
in IEEE 802.11-based multi-rate WLANs but does not
consider QoS support or the main EDCA differentiation
mechanisms specified by the IEEE 802.11e standard.
Our paper analyzes the performance and fairness provision
of a novel resource distribution mechanism for centralized
wireless networks, which does not demand resource requests
and it is able to provide predictable QoS to mixed type network
traffic. The considered Adaptive Weighted and Prioritized
Polling (AWPP) protocol [9] adopts the frame structure and the
basic polling scheme of the efficient Priority Oriented Adaptive
Polling (POAP) protocol [10]. AWPP introduces a new
technique for efficient bandwidth allocation among wireless
stations and packet buffers. More specifically, it provides a
deterministic traffic differentiation engine that operates
proportionally to priorities as well as data rate and takes
advantage of the existing infrastructure since it utilizes the AP
for coordinating access on the shared medium. We first study
the QoS capabilities of AWPP by plotting throughput and
delay performance results for multiple traffic classes. We then
investigate for the first time the fairness of the AWPP protocol
by employing the Jain’s fairness index for various values of the
priority factor and the traffic rate. Finally, we compare the
performance of AWPP against EDCA and POAP protocols and
show that AWPP outperforms both of them.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows:
Section II provides a thorough background on related medium
access control schemes that provide QoS and focuses on the
three potential polling cases of the AWPP protocol. Section III
describes in detail the operation of AWPP and in particular the
buffer and station polling selection algorithms. A throughput,
delay and fairness analysis (by employing the well known
Jain’s fairness index) is carried out in Section IV. Section V
provides various simulation and analytical results that
demonstrate the validity of our analytical approach as well as
the outperformance of AWPP against the EDCA and POAP
protocols. Finally, Section VI concludes the paper.
 II. WLAN MEDIUM ACCESS CONTROL (MAC)
Medium access control in wireless networks is definitely an
active research area. The fast growing user requirements and
networking technologies demand efficient adapting of the
modern MAC protocols. It is expected that Next Generation
wireless networks should be able to provide advanced QoS.
Thus, there are numerous approaches that focus on the MAC
layer and attempt to effectively support QoS by adopting
various techniques. In general, the related proposals can be
classified as distributed or centralized. Distributed solutions
require no central control being relatively flexible, but they are
able to provide only limited QoS support. On the other hand,
the centralized MAC schemes rely on a central entity that
controls medium access resulting to an increased network
feedback. Thus, these schemes are able to provide extensive
QoS, but cannot be easily applied to ad-hoc topologies.
Regarding QoS provision, most approaches utilize traffic
priorities to differentiate flows, while others are based on QoS
requests. The latter techniques enable QoS guarantee, however,
they demand knowledge of the traffic specifications, which
may be quite restrictive, while network overhead is increased.
The most known QoS supportive protocol for WLANs is
EDCA. It is defined as the mandatory access mechanism in the
IEEE 802.11e standard [1] and is expected to be widely
adopted in near future wireless networking products. It controls
medium access based on an exponential backoff algorithm by
employing longer waiting intervals for the low priority traffic
in order to favor high priority traffic access. The RTS/CTS
(Request To Send/Clear To Send) mechanism can be used to
inform adjacent stations of the forthcoming transmission and
hence limit the hidden station problem, which causes increased
packet collisions and in general performance degradation.
Although this mechanism is useful in most network conditions,
it raises overhead while not fully eliminating collisions.
Even though EDCA can partially support QoS, long
waiting times are caused by the backoff process. Thus, time
bounded traffic may greatly suffer [11]. Additionally, the
related resource allocation mechanism is not sufficiently fair
[12]. Due to the above, it can be concluded that EDCA
definitely supplies the legacy IEEE 802.11 with QoS
capabilities, but it fails to adequately support simultaneous
streams of different priorities. Generally, while EDCA is
certainly a QoS capable protocol, it does not appear to be
efficient in serving multiple flows of different priorities, mainly
due to its limited channel utilization. Hence, there is
undoubtedly space for more efficient approaches. On the other
hand, POAP is a highly efficient QoS capable protocol for
WLANs which employs station polling. The considered AWPP
protocol relies on the same polling scheme, which is collision
free, produces limited network overhead and ensures sufficient
feedback for the AP’s decision making procedure. However,
the bandwidth distribution algorithm is completely different.
The potential operation scenarios of the AWPP protocol are
presented below. Notice that tPOLL, tSTATUS, and tNO_DATA are the
transmission durations of the control packets POLL, STATUS,
and NO_DATA respectively, tDATA is the duration of the DATA
packet, and tPROP_DELAY is the signal propagation delay.
The published version of this paper is available by IEEE Xplore at:
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Case A: Polling a station that has no buffered packets to
transmit. The AP sends POLL to station A at time t. Station A
receives it at t+tPOLL+tPROP_DELAY and replies with NO_DATA.
The AP receives that at t+tPOLL+tNO_DATA+2tPROP_DELAY and then
proceeds to new polling.
Case B: Polling a station that has buffered packets to
transmit. The AP sends POLL to station A at time t. Station A
receives it at t+tPOLL+tPROP_DELAY and replies with a STATUS
broadcast, which acts as an acknowledgement. Then, it
transmits DATA directly to station B (which could also be the
AP). If station B successfully receives DATA at
t+tPOLL+tSTATUS+tDATA+3tPROP_DELAY, it broadcasts STATUS,
which acts as data acknowledgement. Otherwise, if data
reception fails but station B was already aware that the packet
was destined to it, it responds with a no-acknowledgement type
STATUS packet. Station’s B STATUS packet is received by
the AP at t+tPOLL+tDATA+2tSTATUS+4tPROP_DELAY, which can then
proceed to a new polling. The DATA packet size is generally
considered to be variable, thus, tDATA is not fixed.
Case C: Polling failure or feedback failure. The AP sends
POLL to station A at time t. If station A fails to receive it at
t+tPOLL+tPROP_DELAY, then the AP has to wait for the maximum
polling cycle before polling again at
t+tPOLL+tMAX_DATA+2tSTATUS+4tPROP_DELAY, because it must be
sure that it will not collide with a possible ongoing
transmission. When polling succeeds, but then the AP fails to
receive any of the following packets, it has to wait for the
maximum polling cycle before the new poll, similarly to the
polling failure case. Note that tMAX_DATA is the duration of the
transmission of the largest allowed DATA packet.
Each STATUS packet carries the sending station’s priority
score, which is utilized by the AP to decide which station to
poll. The priority score indicates the priority and the amount of
packets buffered in the station. The higher the priority score,
the higher the station’s probability to be polled. Inside each
station, the packets to send are queued in different priority
buffers. A buffer is selected for packet transmission according
to its priority and the number of packets it carries. These two
factors are regulated by two weights and the resulted values are
added in order to compute the buffer’s probability to be chosen.
The POAP protocol has been shown to perform efficiently
and adequately differentiate traffic. Nevertheless, the formulas
employed to determine the buffer to select for packet
transmission and the station to select for polling do not allow
practical analysis of the resources distribution. Hence, it is
difficult to pre-configure the protocol parameters. This process
was actually performed heuristically. On the other hand, the
deterministic operation of AWPP that distributes bandwidth
proportionally to priority and traffic rate makes it possible to
analytically determine the network performance metrics and
the provided fairness index.
III. THE AWPP PROTOCOL
A. Determining packet buffer for transmission
A polled station has to determine which packet buffer to
select for transmission. According to AWPP, stations include
buffers, each one corresponding to a different user priority (in
accordance with the IEEE 802.1d standard [13]).This algorithm - Check if there is a station k that carries the maximum SSW
takes into account the priority of each buffer and its current value and the minimum Time Elapsed since last Poll (TEP)
traffic load rate. The objective is to provide a buffer of higher value.
priority and higher traffic rate with proportionally higher
transmission probabilities. Since it is typically expected that - In case there is such a station k, then check if its SSW
priority should greatly affect distribution of resources, we use value is M times higher than the second maximum SSW value
the Priority Factor (PF, default 2) to regulate the buffer and if its TEP value is M times lower than the second minimum
selection probability. The respective algorithm that determines TEP value.
which buffer to choose is described below. Note that the - If the above conditions are both true, then lower the SSW
Estimated Traffic Rate (ETR) is resulted by: value of station k to M times the second maximum SSW value
(2ndMaxSSW):
ETRnew[i]  MF  ETRold [i]  (1  MF )  ITR[i] (1)
SSW [ k ]  M  2ndMaxSSW (6)
where MF is the Memory Factor (default 0.5) and ITR is the
Instant Traffic Rate (calculated for a default duration of 2s). - Calculate the Station Selection Probability of each station
j:
Determining buffer for transmission

M 1
- Calculate the Buffer Selection Weight of each non-empty SSP[ j ]  SSW [ j ] m 0
SSW [ m] (7)
packet buffer i:
- Select station j for polling with probability SSP[j]
BSW [i]  PF BP[i ]  ETR[i] (2)

where BP is the Buffer Priority.

- Calculate Buffered Traffic Indicator of station j:
BTI [ j ]  i 0
#buffers1
BSW [i] (3)
- Calculate the Buffer Selection Probability of each non-
empty packet buffer i:
BSP[i ]  BSW [i ] / BTI (4)
- Select buffer i for packet transmission with probability
BSP[i].
- Transmit the earliest generated packet of the selected
buffer i.
B. Determining station to poll
A station is selected for polling mainly based on its BTI
value. Specifically, the AP utilizes the stations’ BTI values that
it has received via the STATUS packets and taking into
account the time that has elapsed since each station was last
polled, so that channel domination is averted, it decides which
one to select next. This mechanism involves the AP itself when
it has buffered packets, which of course is not needed to be
polled to gain medium access. Considering the special role of
the AP in the network, it receives higher probability to get
transmission permission than an ordinary wireless station. To
be more specific, the AP’s buffers priorities are increased by
the parameter AP_ExtraPriority (default 1). The respective
algorithm that determines which station to poll is described
below.
Determining station to poll
- Calculate the Station Selection Weight of each station j of
M total stations, including the AP, if it has non-empty packet
buffers (the addition of 1 ensures non-zero value):
SSW [i ]  BTI [ j ]  1
(5)
IV. PROTOCOL ANALYSIS
The analysis of the AWPP protocol is characterized as a
straightforward process. Our objective is to estimate the
throughput each station or each traffic type exhibits. Then the
packet delay can be calculated according to Little’s Law [14].
Lastly, the provided fairness can be estimated via the
calculation of the well known Jain’s Fairness Index [15].
Based on the presented technique that the AP uses to
determine which station to poll next, we can directly conclude
that the portion of the available bandwidth each station j is
allowed to exploit equals SSP[j], as it can be derived by (7). At
this point, it should be made clear that when in this paper we
use the term “bandwidth”, we refer to the channel capacity in
bit rate, rather than the electromagnetic feature of the medium
measured in Hertz. Regarding the throughput each station
exhibits, this is eventually resulted by the bandwidth portion it
is allowed to exploit and the amount of bandwidth that possibly
remains unexploited by other stations. The algorithm that we
can follow to analytically estimate each station’s throughput is
described below. Notice that the available bandwidth is noted
as AB and its initial value depends on the physical layer, BU is
the bandwidth utilization, T[j] and TR[j] are the throughput and
traffic load rate of station j, respectively.
Algorithm for estimating stations’ throughput
a) AB = BU×AB (8)
b) Initialize set S to include all participating stations
c) P = {jϵS | SSP[j]×AB ≥ TR[j]} (9)
d) T[j] = TR[j], ∀jϵP (10)
e) AB  AB   T [ j ] , ∀jϵP (11)
j
f) S=S–P (12)
Q  1   SSP[ j ] , ∀jϵP
g) (13)
j

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 h) SSP[j] = SSP[j]/Q, ∀jϵS (14) TABLE I. NETWORK PARAMATERS VALUES
i) If P ≠ ∅, then repeat steps from c, else: Network Parameter Value
T[j] = SSP[j]×AB, ∀jϵS (15) Data Bit Rate 54 Mbps

Control Bit Rate 24 Mbps

It should be mentioned that for this analysis we assume that
Propagation Delay 0.2 μs
the stations’ traffic load rate is constant or that we study its
mean value throughout the observation interval. The presented POLL length 272 bits
algorithm requires the calculation of the bandwidth utilization.
STATUS size 352 bits
Based on the AWPP polling scheme and assuming saturation
conditions where all stations usually carry buffered packets and DATA length 12336 bits
that half of the transmissions originate at the AP, it holds:
2
[(t POLL  t DATA  2t STATUS  4t PROP_DELAY   M 1 
 T [ j]
 
(t DATA  t STATUS  2t PROP_DELAY )] / 2  j 0  (18)
BU  (16) M 1
t DATA M T [ j] 2

The estimation of the throughput enables the computation
of the average delay based on Little’s law, which states that the
average system queue size equals the jobs’ arrival rate
multiplied by the average waiting time. Thus, in order to get an
indication of the delay, we first need to estimate the Average
Buffered Traffic (ABT) as follows:
1  1  (l  T )

ABT  V (t )dt   (lt  Tt )dt 
o  o 2
where τ is the observation interval, V(t) is the buffered traffic at
time t, l is the traffic load rate and T is the average throughput
(in terms of bit rate). Thus, the average delay is estimated to be
equal to ABT/l. It should be clarified that this approach ignores
any packet drops that may occur due to buffer overflow or
packet lifetime expiration. Hence, it is expected to have rather
high delay values that may keep rising during the observation
interval.
The last step in our analysis is the estimation of Jain’s
Fairness Index, which is quite straightforward when already
having the throughput results. Specifically, it equals:
j 0
V. PERFOMANCE RESULTS
The QoS capabilities of the AWPP protocol are studied via
a network scenario that involves multiple traffic classes.
Specifically, four traffic classes are considered: Best Effort
(BE) traffic of priority 0, Excellent Effort (EE) traffic of
(17) priority 3, Streaming Multimedia (SM) traffic of priority 4, and
Interactive Voice (IV) traffic of priority 6. Unless otherwise
specified, the traffic generation rate of each class is equal to
500kbps per flow. The AP is the source of four different class
flows destined to each wireless station, while another identical
four flows originate at each wireless station and destine to the
AP. We ensure traffic symmetry and keep the analysis practical
by setting AP_ExtraPriority equal to 0.
The main objective of this study is to examine the behavior
of the different traffic class flows in a comparative way. Hence,
following the presented approach we get results referring to the
different traffic classes. Initially, we attain throughput and
delay results for the AWPP protocol and validate the presented
analytical approach using simulation. Some of the considered
network parameters are summarized in Table I.
Regarding the simulation process, we employed a unified

25000 30
BE (A) BE (S) BE (A) BE (S)
EE (A) EE (S) EE (A) EE (S)
SM (A) SM (S) 25 SM (A) SM (S)
20000
IV (A) IV (S) IV (A) IV (S)
Throughput (kbps)

20
15000
Delay (s)

15
10000
10

5000
5

0 0
0 25000 50000 75000 100000 0 25000 50000 75000 100000
Network Load (kbps) Network Load (kbps)
Figure 1. Simulation (S) and analytical (A) values of throughput versus Figure 2. Simulation (S) and analytical (A) values of delay versus
network load for the AWPP protocol network load for the AWPP protocol

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 IV Traffic
1 AWPP
POAP
0.95
EDCA
0.9
Jain's Fairness Index

0.85 10

0.8 8
0.75

Delay (s)
6
0.7
4
0.65 PF = 1 PF = 2
2 15000
0.6 PF = 3 PF = 4
0 10000
0.55
60000
50000 5000
0 25000 50000 75000 100000 40000
30000
Network Load (kbps) 20000 0
10000 Throughput (kbps)
Figure 3. Jain’s Fairness Index vs network load for the AWPP protocol Network Load (kbps)

event-based simulator developed in C++ to model the studied
protocols, focusing on the accuracy of MAC. It is validated via
the comparison of its output with the analytical results.
Figures 1 and 2 provide simulative and analytical results for
the traffic throughput and average delay performance of
AWPP. As far as the analytical calculations, Eq. (16) was first
computed with the values presented in Table I and the result for
BU was 0.876. Moreover, the network load is regulated by
changing the number of stations. Our analytical model is
validated since an almost exact match between analytical and
simulation results is observed. The figures demonstrate that
when low load is considered all traffic is fully served.
However, when load increases the lower priority flows receive
limited bandwidth due to the fact that the higher priority traffic
should be sufficiently served.
Figure 3 plots Jain’s Fairness Index versus network load for
different values of the Priority Factor (PF). It should be pointed
out that our objective is to measure fairness among traffic
classes but not per-station; hence, we have adjusted (18)
accordingly. Since PF actually defines how much a traffic class
is favored against a lower priority class, it is expected to have
lower fairness among classes when PF is high. Furthermore,
under high load conditions it is not possible to adequately serve
all flows and fairness decreases due to the fact that higher
priority traffic gains more resources. As it expected, when PF
equals 1, then based on (2) classes are not differentiated
1
Jain's Fairness Index
Figure 5. IV traffic: Delay and throughput versus network load
according to their priority, thus, they are all equally served and
the resulted fairness index is equal to 1.
Since AWPP distributes resources by also taking into
account the traffic rate, we have examined how this factor
affects the provided fairness. The 3D curve in Figure 4
represents Jain’s Fairness Index as a function of varying BE
and IV traffic rates. EE and SM traffic rates are considered
constant (equal to 500kbps). The figure illustrates that the
variation of the high priority IV class traffic rate affects the
provided fairness in a much greater degree than BE traffic.
We next study the AWPP performance against the EDCA
and POAP protocols in a specialized developed simulation
framework, adapted to the operational characteristics of each
protocol. The condition of any considered link was modeled
using a finite-state machine and we employed the default
parameter values for all protocols. The comparative
performance of the three protocols is plotted in Figures 5 to 8
and the simulation results are derived by utilizing a statistical
analysis based on the “sequential simulation” method. The
average delay and the traffic throughput have been depicted in
a 3D curve against network load for each separate traffic class.
Figure 5 shows that in our scenario AWPP fully serves the
SM Traffic
AWPP
POAP
EDCA
30
25
20

Delay (s)

0.8 15

0.6 10
5
0.4
0
30000
0.2 8000
4000 4000 6000
3000 20000
2000 2000 4000
Network Load (kbps) 2000
IV DataRate (kbps) 1000 BE DataRate (kbps) 10000 0
0 0 Throughput (kbps)

Figure 4. Jain’s Fairness Index versus BE and IV traffic data rates Figure 6. SM traffic: Delay and throughput versus network load

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 EE Traffic VI. CONCLUSIONS
AWPP This paper provided a detailed analysis of the performance
30 POAP and fairness provision of the AWPP MAC protocol for wireless
EDCA networks. Our performance analysis is validated through
25 plotting analytical results against simulation results. The
20
analytical results prove the deterministic operation of the
proposed AWPP protocol which efficiently differentiates
Delay (s)

15 traffic proportionally to traffic priority and rate. A further

10
5 known EDCA protocol as well as the highly efficient POAP
0
30000
20000
5000
Network Load (kbps) 10000 0 [1]
Throughput (kbps)
Figure 7. EE traffic: Delay and throughput versus load
IV traffic flows regardless the network load whereas POAP
fails to sufficiently serve the IV traffic under high load
conditions and EDCA comparatively performs constantly low.
Figure 6 demonstrates that AWPP succeeds in providing high
SM traffic throughput and low delay for higher load values
compared to POAP, while EDCA performs significantly worse.
Regarding EE traffic, Figure 7 illustrates that AWPP achieves
the highest maximum throughput, whereas POAP slightly
achieves the lowest maximum delay. Furthermore, both
protocols seem to reserve resources for higher priority traffic
when network load gets heavy. On the other hand, the inferior
behavior of EDCA in all load conditions is obvious. Finally,
Figure 8 depicts that BE traffic starts receiving significantly
limited resources when they are necessary for the sufficient
service of the higher priority traffic, particularly in AWPP,
according to the operation concept of the examined and the
POAP protocols. As far as EDCA is concerned, it is clear that
under all conditions it serves BE traffic in a non-satisfactory
way. At this point it is essential to clarify that in particular
under high load conditions the scenario becomes very
demanding since it involves multiple flows of four different
priorities, while bandwidth remains limited. Considering also
that all packets remain in the buffers and none is dropped, it is
expected to attain high delay values.
BE Traffic
20
15
Delay (s)
comparative simulation analysis shows that AWPP is capable
of providing enhanced QoS support compared to the well
scheme.
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5000 Throughput (kbps)
Network Load (kbps) 10000 0

Figure 8. BE traffic: Delay and throughput versus network load

The published version of this paper is available by IEEE Xplore at:

http://doi.org/10.1109/icc.2011.5963258