Performance Analysis of A-MSDU and UDP in IEEE 802.11 Wireless Linear Multi-hop Network

Abstract

IEEE 802.11 utilizes frame aggregation to reduce the MAC overhead and to increase the throughput. Frame aggregation technology is also used in linear multi-hop wireless networks to improve end-to-end system performance. We analyze the performance of the A-MSDU aggregation scheme in a wireless linear multi-hop network. Meanwhile, we also discussed the impact of UDP payload size on frame aggregation performance. A performance study using the discrete-event simulator ns-3 illustrates the changing of end-to-end throughput in different environments. We find that the A-MSDU mechanism can improve the performance of the multi-hop system to a certain extent, but it will also bring higher system delay and LPR. The latter often severely weakens the system performance in the case of a poor channel environment. Too high an LPR will cause a decrease in throughput. Therefore, we need to be careful when choosing whether to use the A-MSDU mechanism and the size of the A-MSDU Limit.