An Empirical Study of the EDCA QoS Mechanism for Voice over WLAN

An empirical analysis of EDCA QoS mechanism defined in IEEE 802.11e standard is presented in this paper. Measurements were carried out in controlled laboratory conditions, with and without configured QoS. Mean and maximum delay, jitter and packet loss were measured in voice communications between two clients, first competing with best effort clients, and then competing with voice clients. The results show that QoS mechanism brings significant improvements in the transmission of voice, which is especially significant in the case of highly loaded network.