IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs operating in the infrastructure mode are extremely popular and have seen widespread deployment because of their convenience and cost efficiency. A large number of research studies have investigated the performance of DCF, the default MAC protocol in 802.11 WLANs. Previous studies have pointed out several performance problems caused by the interaction of DCF in infrastructure-based WLANs. This thesis addresses a few of these issues. In the first part of the thesis, we address the issue of head-of-line (HOL) blocking at the Access Point (AP) in infrastructure WLANs. We use a cooperative ARQ scheme to resolve the obstruction at the AP queue. We analytically study the performance of our scheme in a single cell IEEE 802.11 infrastructure WLAN under a TCP controlled file download scenario and validate our analysis by extensive simulations. Both analysis and simulation results show considerable increase in system throughput with the cooperative ARQ scheme. We further examine the delay performance of the ARQ scheme in the presence of both elastic TCP traffic and delay sensitive VoIP traffic. Simulations results show that our scheme decreases the delay in the downlink for VoIP packets significantly while simultaneously providing considerable gains in the TCP download throughput. Next, we propose a joint uplink/downlink opportunistic scheduling scheme for maximising system throughput in infrastructure WLANs. We first solve the uplink/downlink unfairness that exists in infrastructure WLANs by maintaining a separate queue and a backoff timer at the AP for each mobile station (STA). We also increase the system throughput by making the backoff timer a function of the channel gains. We analyse the I performance of our scheme under symmetric UDP traffic with i. i. d. channel conditions. Finally, we discuss several opportunistic scheduling policies which aim to increase the system throughput while satisfying certain Quality of Service (QoS) objectives. The standard IEEE 802.11 DCF protocol only offers best-effort services and does not provide any QoS guarantees. Providing QoS in 802.11 networks with time varying channel conditions has proven to be a challenge. We show by simulations that by an appropriate choice of the scheduling metric in our opportunistic scheduling scheme, different QOS objectives like maximizing weighted system sum throughput, minimum rate guarantees and throughput optimality can be attained.

L'interférence entre stations de base est considérée comme le principal facteur limitant les performances des réseaux cellulaires. Nous nous intéressons aux différents schémas de coordination multi-point (CoMP) proposés dans la norme LTE-A pour y faire face, en tenant compte de l'aspect dynamique du trafic et de la mobilité des utilisateurs. Les résultats sont obtenus par l'analyse mathématique de modèles markoviens et par des simulations du système. Nous montrons l'importance de l'algorithme d'ordonnancement sur les performances en présence d'utilisateurs mobiles, pour des services de téléchargement de fichier et de streaming vidéo. Nous proposons un nouvel algorithme d'ordonnancement basé sur la dé-priorisation des utilisateurs mobiles se trouvant en bord de cellule, afin d'améliorer l'efficacité globale du système. Nous montrons ensuite qu'il est intéressant d'activer la technique dite Joint Processing uniquement dans un réseau à forte interférence, son activation dans un réseau à faible interférence pouvant conduire à une dégradation des performances. Nous proposons un nouveau mécanisme de coordination où une cellule ne coopère que lorsque sa coopération apporte un gain moyen de débit suffisant pour compenser les pertes de ressources engendrées. Nous considérons enfin la technique de formation de faisceaux coordonnée. Nous montrons notamment que la coordination n'est pas nécessaire lorsque l'on dispose d'un grand nombre d'antennes par station de base, un simple mécanisme d'ordonnancement opportuniste permettant d'obtenir des performances optimales. Pour un nombre limité d’antennes parstation de base, la coordination est nécessaire afin d’éviter l’interférence entre les faisceaux activés, et permet des gains de performance substantiels. / Interference is still the main limiting factor in cellular networks. We focus on the different coordinated multi-point schemes (CoMP) proposed in the LTE-A standard to cope with interference, taking into account the dynamic aspect of traffic and users’ mobility. The results are obtained by the analysis of Markov models and system-level simulations. We show the important impact of the scheduling strategy on the network performance in the presence of mobile users considering elastic traffic and video streaming. We propose a new scheduler that deprioritizes mobile users at the cell edge, in order to improve the overall system efficiency. We show that it is interesting to activate Joint Processing technique only in a high-interference network, its activation in a low-interference network may lead to performance degradation. We propose a new coordination mechanism, where a cell cooperates only when its cooperation brings a sufficient mean throughput gain, which compensates the extra resource consumption. Finally, we show that the coordination of beams is not necessary when a large number of antennas is deployed at each base station; a simple opportunistic scheduling strategy provides optimal performance. For a limited number of antennas per base station,coordination is necessary to avoid interference between the activated beams, allowing substantial performance gains.