Recently, the IEEE 802.11 working group has announced a new distributed access mechanism called Enhanced DCF (EDCF) to provide service differentiation among traffic classes defined as access category. With the increasing demand for supporting Quality of Service (QoS) in IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs, the EDCF is now attracting many researchers' attention due to its practical worth as a standard mechanism. In this paper, we focus on the analytical approach to evaluate the performance of the EDCF. An analytical model is presented to estimate the throughput of the EDCF in saturation (asymptotic) conditions by substantially revising and extending the analytical model developed by Bianchi for the performance analysis of the DCF. Extensive simulation studies based on the NS‐2 simulator have been carried out for the validation of the analysis, and they show that it estimates the throughput of the EDCF accurately. By utilizing the analytical model, we evaluate the performance of the EDCF. Specifically, we concentrate on discovering the characteristics of the EDCF parameters, such as CWmin, CWmax and AIFS, in the way that they influence on the performance of the EDCF. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Time synchronization in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is a fundamental issue for the coordination of distributed entities and events. Nondeterministic latency, which may decrease the accuracy and precision of time synchronization can occur at any point in the network layers. Specially, random back-off by channel contention leads to a large uncertainty. In order to reduce the large nondeterministic uncertainty from channel contention, we propose an enhanced precision time synchronization protocol in this paper. The proposed method reduces the traffic needed for the synchronization procedure by selectively forwarding the packet. Furthermore, the time difference between sensor nodes increases as time advances because of the use of a clock source with a cheap crystal oscillator. In addition, we provide a means to maintain accurate time by adopting hardware-assisted time stamp and drift correction. Experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed method, for which sensor nodes are designed and implemented. According to the evaluation results, the performance of the proposed method is better than that of a traditional time synchronization protocol.

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One of the most promising approaches to address the mismatch between computation- intensive applications and computation-limited end devices is multi-access edge computing (MEC). To overcome the rapid increase in traffic volume and offload the traffic from macrocells, a massive number of small cells have been deployed, so-called heterogeneous networks (HetNets). Strongly motivated by the close integration of MEC and HetNets, in this paper, we propose an envisioned architecture of MEC-empowered HetNets, where both wireless and wired backhaul solutions are supported, flying base stations (BSs) can be equipped with MEC servers, and mobile users (MUs) need both communication and computation resources for their computationally heavy tasks. Subsequently, we provide the research progress summary of task offloading and resource allocation in the proposed MEC-empowered unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted heterogeneous networks. We complete this article by spotlighting key challenges and open future directives for researches.