Allocation of in-home network resources to competing multimedia streams using EDCA

The wireless standard IEEE 802.11e provides quality of service (QoS) support allowing prioritized sharing of the channel bandwidth by a set of competing devices. This is particularly relevant for wireless in-home networks that are used by the consumer electronics (CE) devices that provide various quality levels of multimedia streaming services. The IEEE 802.11e standard supports a cooperative distributed control of the bandwidth sharing (EDCA) through a set of parameters that can be controlled by the communicating devices. This paper investigates the impact of these parameters on the bandwidth sharing through extensive simulations. We study several system setups of communicating pairs which can be regarded as generating competing multimedia traffic of different quality. Our simulation results show sensitivity of channel bandwidth allocation, and inherently sensitivity of QoS of multimedia streams, to the parameter change. The effect of individual parameter changes for various fixed values of other parameters is shown, based on which values of the individual parameters can be set to provide the required QoS. The presented results can provide the basis for embedding parameter settings into the system software of the CE devices.