Multi-user OFDMA frame aggregation for future wireless local area networking

Abstract

State-of-the-art wireless local area networking enables frame aggregation as approach to increase MAC efficiency. However, frame aggregation is limited to the aggregation of packets destined for the same station. In order to serve different stations, the access point still has to contend for the channel multiple times. In this paper we propose and evaluate a novel approach that enables multi-user frame aggregation. We combine this concept with channel-dependent OFDMA resource assignments, yielding a higher PHY efficiency (by exploiting multi-user diversity and instantaneous channel state information) as well as a higher MAC efficiency. The downside to this approach is the increase in protocol overhead to enable such multi-user OFDMA frame aggregation. However, we show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-theart 802.11n for different packet sizes and stations to be served. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2009.