Performance Analysis of Block Acknowledgement Mechanisms for Next Generation Wireless Networks

The IEEE 802.11n standard has been proposed to provide enhanced throughput performance for the wireless local area networks. Most of the existing research work considers packet aggregation techniques for enhancing the network throughput from the medium access control perspective. Consequently, the large amount of small-sized acknowledgement (ACK) packets are aggregated via the block ACK mechanisms in order to improve the system throughput. In this paper, a block ACK classification is proposed to categorize the existing block ACK mechanisms into the greedy and the conservative schemes. Based on the Markovian techniques, the respective analytical models are constructed in order to measure the throughput-related metric of the window utilization under different packet error probabilities. Simulations are conducted to validate and compare the proposed analytical models associated with the two types of block ACK schemes. It can be observed from the numerical results that the greedy scheme outperforms the conservative approach with comparably higher window utilization.