TDuCSMA: Efficient support for triple-play services in wireless home networks

The recently proposed Time-Division Unbalanced Carrier Sense Multiple Access (TDuCSMA) coordination function has been shown to cope very efficiently with many different data flows with widely different bitrates and packet lengths. This case may happen in a typical wireless home network setting where HD video, voice, videosurveillance and videoconference applications are used concurrently. This paper illustrates the advantages of TDuCSMA in such a scenario compared to the Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA), currently provided by the IEEE 802.11 standard, in terms of both performance from the end user's point of view and network resource utilization. The results show that TDuCSMA provides much better performance than EDCA, especially regarding video quality, delay and packet loss rate for voice streams, and stability over time. Moreover, the TDuCSMA performance is consistent as the network load increases while the EDCA performance significantly decreases.