Delay-constrained optimized packet aggregation in high-speed wireless ad hoc networks

Abstract

In recent years, high-speed WLANs are introduced to service growing demand of delay-sensitive and multimedia applications. To improve efficiency at the MAC layer of high-speed WLANs, few researches have tried to utilize approaches such as Aggregation in which a number of packets concatenated into a larger frame to reduce protocol overheads. Since transmitting larger frames causes increases in delay and jitter which are crucial, especially in delay-sensitive and multimedia applications, selecting the best aggregated frame size is significant. In this paper, we propose an analytical model for optimized packet aggregation (OPA) that finds the optimized aggregation size with regard to delay constraints of nodes. OPA enhances one of the aggregation methods, aggregation with fragment retransmission (AFR) scheme, and models aggregation by a constrained convex optimization problem to maximize network throughput while constraining the delay. Simulation results show that OPA increases throughput and decreases the average delay as well. © 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.