KF-BACK: Kalman Filter-Based Activation of Block Acknowledgement in IEEE 802.11ax

Abstract

IEEE 802.11ax amendment of IEEE 802.11 has been proposed in order to provide high throughput performance in wireless local area networks. In IEEE 802.11ax, as a key feature of the medium access control (MAC) layer, block acknowledgement (BACK) can reduce the overhead of the MAC layer and improve network throughput, by aggregating multiple acknowledgements into a single frame. However, in an erroneous channel, a loss of a BACK frame leads to a loss of multiple acknowledgements. Therefore, BACK scheme needs to be activated dynamically based on the prediction of the channel condition. Accordingly, in this paper, we propose Kalman Filter-based BACK (KF-BACK) to adaptively estimate future transmission queue threshold and the noise in the network for activating BACK. Simulation results demonstrate that KF -BACK can significantly enhance network performance compared to the static BACK scheme.