Packing mechanisms for the IEEE 802.11n wireless LANs

Abstract

IEEE 802.11 WLAN products can provide up to 54 Mbps data rate, and the next generation WLAN will provide much higher data rates. However, the medium access control (MAC) was designed for lower data rates, such as 1-2 Mbps, and is not an efficient MAC. Furthermore, a theoretical throughput limit exists due to overhead and limitations of physical implementations, and therefore increasing transmission rate cannot help a lot. Designing efficient MAC strategies becomes critical and important. In this paper, we propose several MAC strategies, such as packing, concatenation, and multiple frame transmission, to overcome the fundamental overhead and to improve performance. The aim is to propose and introduce efficient new MAC not only for current IEEE 802.11 standards (.11a/.11b/.11g), but also for the next generation WLAN with higher speed and higher throughput, i.e., IEEE 802.11n.