Capacity and performance study of IEEE 802.11e in WLANs and ad hoc networks

Abstract

This master thesis focuses on the IEEE 802.11e Enhanced Distribution Channel Access (EDCA). The IEEE 802.11e protocol became an IEEE standard in November 2005 and is a very popular research topic. Even though the protocol has been tested for faults and errors a long time there are still research topics to explore. This thesis will try to answer some of those topics.

The main topic in this thesis is how the IEEE 802.11e MAC operates in a multihop ad hoc network. We discuss and evaluated the findings along with simulation results, and compare our work with earlier work on the same topic that used the legacy IEEE 802.11 standard. The results we present are interesting throughput results that seem to tell us that the new IEEE 802.11e is better then the original WLAN standard when it comes to multihop ad hoc network forwarding.