Wireless LAN packet concatenation algorithm

Abstract

The general frame size in an IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN environment is often much smaller than the specified MTU size. The small size of the frames increases the MAC layer traffic and can cause degradation in network performance. In this paper, we propose new IP packet concatenation methods that are able to merge two or more IP packets with same destination addresses into a MPDU. Our method provides a continuous monitoring of the channel state. If there are IP packets that can be concatenated, the concatenation is carried out at the same time as the channels are allocated to other nodes. At the receiving end, the data size of the received MPDU and the total length field in the IP header are compared to determine whether the received frame is concatenated or not. Our proposed method avoids any packet concatenation delay. When MAC layer traffic is low, our method provides a similar performance to existing wireless LANs. Our method can also improve the transmission performance as an increase in MAC layer traffic results in a decrease in the total traffic.