An optimized A-MSDU frame aggregation with subframe retransmission in IEEE 802.11n wireless networks

• Main Authors: Saif, Anwar, Othman, Mohamed, K. Subramaniam, Shamala, Abdul Hamid, Nor Asilah Wati
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier 2012
• Online Access: http://psasir.upm.edu.my/id/eprint/43080/1/An%20Optimized%20A-MSDU%20Frame%20Aggregation%20with%20Subframe%20Retransmission%20in%20IEEE%20802.11n%20Wireless%20Networks.pdf; http://psasir.upm.edu.my/id/eprint/43080/; http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877050912002086

The IEEE 802.11n standard is defined to achieve a high throughput at the MAC layer. This high throughput is accomplished via many enhancements in both the physical and MAC layers. A key enhancement introduced in the 802.11n standard is frame aggregation. Two types of aggregation defined by the 802.11n standard, aggregate MAC service data unit (A-MSDU) and aggregate MAC protocol data unit (A-MPDU). Frame aggregation reduces both the headers and timing overheads at the MAC layer by aggregating multiple frames into a single large frame before being transmitted. The aggregation headers themselves still have a negative impact on the network performance especially when aggregating frames of small payload. Moreover, the lack of partial retransmission in the A-MSDU aggregation is behind its poor performance in error-prone channels. In this paper we proposed an optimized header A-MSDU frame aggregation (OHA-MSDU) with subframes retransmission capability at the MSDU level. The simulation results show the significance of the proposed scheme, especially for applications that have a small frame size such as VoIP.