IEEE 802.11e MAC-level FEC performance evaluation and enhancement

We evaluate and enhance the performance of the Forward Error Correction (FEC) scheme being defined in the upcoming IEEE 802.11e Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol. A novel retransmission-combining technique is proposed to enhance the performance of the MAC-level FEC scheme. We also identify a problem with the IEEE 802.11a physical (PHY) layer when it is used with the MAC-level FEC. A new PHY frame format, backward compatible with the original format, is proposed to resolve the problem. Finally, we analytically evaluate the error performance of the MAC-level FEC, and its enhanced performance via retransmission-combining and new 802.11a PHY frame format.