Dynamic A-MPDU adaptation method for airtime fairness in channel bonding-ready WLANs

Channel bonding is a technology to increase the transmission rate by bundling and using multiple continuous channels. However, the communication performance is likely to degrade frequently due to the channel competition caused by the rapid increase of the wireless LAN devices. Dynamic channel bonding is expected to become the mainstream in the future from the viewpoint of efficient channel utilization even under the severe competitive condition. However, since the implementation of the dynamic channel bonding to real PC and simulator is in the preliminary stage, the detailed performance investigation has not been carried out. None of existing studies examines the performance of the dynamic channel bonding at the frame level with CSMA/CA functions under the diverse channel competition condition. In this study, we first examine the performance of the dynamic channel bonding with CSMA/CA functions through theoretical approach (2 M/M/1/K) from the view point of frame level. In addition, we then implement the channel bonding mechanism into the Scenargie simulator and then verify its effectiveness through the comparison between simulation results and theoretical ones. Simulation results show that the dynamic channel bonding is suffering from the performance degradation due to the performance anomaly problem caused by the airtime unfairness, we thus propose a dynamic A-MPDU adaptation method. We showed that our proposed method can maximize throughput while achieving airtime fairness, irrespective of different patterns of channel competition.