Performance analysis and enhancement for the current and future IEEE 802.11 MAC protocols
ACM SIGMOBILE Mobile Computing and Communications Review
Aggregation with fragment retransmission for very high-speed WLANs
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
IEEE 802.11n MAC Enhancement and Performance Evaluation
Mobile Networks and Applications
IEEE 802.11n: enhancements for higher throughput in wireless LANs
IEEE Wireless Communications
IEEE 802.11n MAC frame aggregation mechanisms for next-generation high-throughput WLANs
IEEE Wireless Communications
Wireless Personal Communications: An International Journal
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The main goal of the IEEE 802.11n standard is to achieve a minimum throughput of 100 Mbps at the MAC service access point. This high throughput has been achieved via many enhancements in both the physical and MAC layers. A key enhancement at the MAC layer is frame aggregation in which the timing and headers overheads of the legacy MAC are reduced by aggregating multiple frames into a single large frame before being transmitted. Two aggregation schemes have been defined by the 802.11n standard, aggregate MAC service data unit (A-MSDU) and aggregate MAC protocol data unit (A-MPDU). As a consequence of the aggregation, new aggregation headers are introduced and become parts of the transmitted frame. Even though these headers are small compared to the legacy headers they still have a negative impact on the network performance, especially when aggregating frames of small payload. Moreover, the A-MSDU is highly influenced by the channel condition due mainly to lack of subframes sequence control and retransmission. In this paper, we have proposed an aggregation scheme (mA-MSDU) that reduces the aggregation headers and implements a retransmission control over the individual subframes at the MSDU level. The analysis and simulations results show the significance of the proposed scheme, specifically for applications that have a small frame size such as VoIP.