Analysis of IEEE 802.11 WLAN frame aggregation under different network conditions

Abstract

IEEE 802.11n and IEEE 802.11ac are called next generation Wireless LANs (WLANs) for their revolutionary improvement in performance. Two key techniques that enhance the performances of these standards are frame aggregation and Block Acknowledgement (BLOCK ACK). In this paper, we describe these techniques as well as establish an analytical relationship between saturation throughput of the network and other network parameters such as-Aggregation Size, Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) etc. We validate our analysis using network simulator-3 (ns-3) simulations. Additionally, we examine the performance of frame aggregation and Block ACK mechanism using the same. The analysis and simulation led us to enlist some open issues regarding frame aggregation in the concluding section.