Efficiency analysis of burst transmissions with block ACK in contention-based 802.11e WLANs
The channel utilization efficiency of the standard 802.11 networks is severely compromised when high data transmission rates are employed, since physical layer headers and control frames are transmitted at low rate, thus wasting more channel time, proportionally. The extensions defined in the emerging 802.11e for quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning include some new mechanisms developed in order to improve the efficiency. Those include data transmission bursting (referred to as TXOP operation) and acknowledgment aggregation (referred to as block ACK). These two features allow it to offer new data transmission services, in which the data delivery and acknowledgment unit is not a single fram…
A performance analysis of block ACK scheme for IEEE 802.11e networks
The demand for the IEEE 802.11 wireless local-area networks (WLANs) has been drastically increasing along with many emerging applications and services over WLAN. However, the IEEE 802.11 medium access control (MAC) is known to be limited in terms of its throughput performance due to the high MAC overhead, such as interframe spaces (IFS) or per-frame based acknowledgement (ACK) frame transmissions. The IEEE 802.11e MAC introduces the block ACK scheme for improving the system efficiency of the WLAN. Using the block ACK scheme can reduce the ACK transmission overhead by integrating multiple ACKs for a number of data frames into a bitmap that is contained in a block ACK frame, thus increasing t…
Revisit of RTS/CTS Exchange in High-Speed IEEE 802.11 Networks
IEEE 802.11 medium access control (MAC), called distributed coordination function (DCF), provides two different access modes, namely, 2-way (basic access) and 4-way (RTS/CTS) handshaking. The 4-way handshaking has been introduced in order to combat the hidden terminal phenomenon. It has been also proved that such a mechanism can be beneficial even in the absence of hidden terminals, because of the collision time reduction. We analyze the effectiveness of the RTS/CTS access mode, in current 802.11b and 802.11a networks. Since the rates employed for control frame transmissions can be much lower than the rate employed for data frames, the assumption on the basis of the 4-way handshaking introd…
Temporal Fairness Provisioning in Multi-Rate Contention-Based 802.11e WLANs
The IEEE 802.11e extensions for QoS support in WLAN define the transmission opportunity (TXOP) concept, in order to limit the channel holding times of the contending stations in the presence of delay-sensitive traffic. We evaluate the use of TXOP for a different purpose: "temporal fairness" provisioning among stations employing different data rates. We show that the equalization of the channel access times allows each station to obtain its throughput basically (1) proportional to its transmission rate, and (2) independent of the transmitted frame length. This also improves the aggregate throughput of the overall WLAN. For a given TXOP limit, i.e., a granted channel access time, a station is…