MAC enhancements for wireless LANs

In current WiFi networks, to transmit a 1500 byte packet, as the physical data rate increases to about 1Gbps, the throughput just increases up to 55 Mbps. The reason for this throughput inefficiency stems from the fundamental limitations existed in the current WLANs. In this paper, we review two recent MAC enhancements that improve the throughput efficiency: the idle sense scheme and the aggregation with fragment retransmission (AFR) scheme, and discuss their respective advantages and disadvantages.