PHY-Supported Frame Aggregation for Wireless Local Area Networks

Abstract

An aggregate medium access control (MAC) service data unit (A-MSDU) contains multiple subframes with a single sequence number. Hence, it has a major drawback in environments with high error rates because if any subframes are corrupted, then the entire A-MSDU will be lost. In addition, performance of the A-MSDU depends strongly on the choice of parameters, such as frame size, modulation level, coding rate, and spatial mode. In this paper, a novel link-adaptation mechanism, dubbed physical (PHY)-supported frame aggregation (PSFA), is proposed over IEEE 802.11 networks, and its performance is analyzed. The proposed PSFA technique is based on a cross-layer interaction that enables joint optimization of various parameters between the PHY and MAC layers. This paper derives a new packet error rate (PER) expression for convolutionally coded multiple-input multiple-output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) systems as an example. Then, this PER expression is used to efficiently estimate the link quality, given the channel conditions and system parameters, and most importantly, it is able to facilitate a parametric study of the cross-layer interaction. In the proposed PSFA algorithm, we present a rule for selecting the parameters so that MAC throughput is maximized. It is shown analytically and verified using Monte Carlo simulations that this choice of parameters can improve throughput performance significantly and also ensure quality of service (QoS) requirements compared to existing conventional algorithms.