Abstract
The throughput of IEEE 802.11 standard is significantly bounded by the associated Medium Access Control (MAC) overhead. Because of the overhead, an upper limit exists for throughput, which is bounded, including situations where data rates are extremely high. Therefore, an overhead reduction is necessary to achieve higher throughput. The IEEE 802.11e amendment introduced the block ACK mechanism, to reduce the number of control messages in MAC. Although the block ACK scheme greatly reduces overhead, further improvements are possible. In this letter, we propose an implicit block ACK method that further reduces the overhead associated with IEEE 802.11e’s block ACK scheme. The mathematical analysis results are presented for both the original protocol and the proposed scheme. A performance improvement of greater than 10% was achieved with the proposed implementation.
Highlights
The explosion of various wireless networking technologies and smart devices are demanding the exchange of rich multimedia contents and sensed data [1,2,3,4,5]
In order to enhance the efficiency of block ACK (BA) in IEEE 802.11e, we propose an implicit BA request mechanism that decreases the overhead associated with BA
A BA timeout can occur in two situations: either the last MAC Protocol Data Units (MPDUs) is not received by the recipient, or the BACK frame is not received by the originator
Summary
The explosion of various wireless networking technologies and smart devices are demanding the exchange of rich multimedia contents and sensed data [1,2,3,4,5]. A transmitter is assigned a fixed time duration called transmission opportunity (TXOP), during which a block of data frames is transmitted. Aggregation of multiple frames improves the network throughput under error free channel, a large aggregated frame means stations have to wait longer period of time for the channel access. IEEE 802.11e introduced the BA scheme as shown in Figure 1 to reduce the overhead caused by multiple ACK transmissions. The BA allows multiple MPDUs transmission in a burst with a gap of short inter-frame space (SIFS) duration and acknowledged by BA frame (BACK). BACK contains status regarding the success/failure reception of individual MPDU in the form of a bitmap Transmission of both BREQ and BACK frames are done at data transmission rate.
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