Frame Aggregation in Central Controlled 802.11 WLANs: The Latency Versus Throughput Tradeoff

Frame aggregation is widely used in 802.11 WLANs in order to provide a significant throughput improvement. However, the latency increase that comes as a counterpart can reduce the quality experienced by the users of applications with real-time constraints. This letter explores the throughput versus latency tradeoff in the context of central controlled solutions (e.g. SDWN-based). First, a scenario with a single Access Point (AP) is used to illustrate the problem and to propose two possible solutions. Then, a centralized algorithm that dynamically (de)activates aggregation is tested in a scenario with a number of APs. The results show that aggregation parameters can be tuned in order to keep latency in low levels, with a low throughput penalty.