Delay-Constrained Optimized Packet Aggregation in High-Speed Wireless Networks

High-speed wireless networks such as IEEE 802.11n have been introduced based on IEEE 802.11 to meet the growing demand for high-throughput and multimedia applications. It is known that the medium access control (MAC) efficiency of IEEE 802.11 decreases with increasing the physical rate. To improve efficiency, few solutions have been proposed such as Aggregation to concatenate a number of packets into a larger frame and send it at once to reduce the protocol overhead. Since transmitting larger frames eventuates to dramatic delay and jitter increase in other nodes, bounding the maximum aggregated frame size is important to satisfy delay requirements of especially multimedia applications. In this paper, we propose a scheme called Optimized Packet Aggregation (OPA) which models the network by constrained convex optimization to obtain the optimal aggregation size of each node regarding to delay constraints of other nodes. OPA attains proportionally fair sharing of the channel while satisfying delay constrains. Furthermore, reaching the optimal point is guaranteed in OPA with low complexity. Simulation results show that OPA can successfully bound delay and meet the requirements of nodes with only an insignificant throughput penalty due to limiting the aggregation size even in dynamic conditions.