Performance Analysis of A Retransmission Scheme for High-Data-Rate MAC Protocol in Wireless LANs

In the past few years, wireless local area networks (WLANs) have been widely deployed, where the most important standard is IEEE 802.11. To support high data rate applications in the next generation WLANs, a common approach is to aggregate multiple upper layer packets into one large frame in the MAC layer. However, with the increase of frame size, the frame error rate will also be increased in error-prone wireless environments. Therefore, existing frame retransmission scheme may not be efficient since the entire frame will be retransmitted. In this paper, we study a retransmission scheme that is suitable for the aggregation-based MAC protocol, in which only the packets that encounter transmission errors will be retransmitted. The main contribution of our study is to develop an analytical model for evaluating the saturated throughput performance of the MAC protocol. Extensive simulation and analytical results show that, our model is highly accurate and the proposed retransmission scheme can significantly improve the throughput performance in error-prone wireless channels.