Channel adaptive ACK mechanism in IEEE 802.15.3 wireless personal area networks

In IEEE 802.15.3 wireless personal area networks (WPANs), the acknowledgement (ACK) mechanism has significant impact on the throughput. In this paper, we propose a channel adaptive ACK (CA-ACK) mechanism where an ACK is selectively transmitted depending on wireless channel conditions to maximize the throughput. Specifically, an ACK is transmitted only when the frame error rate (FER) is greater than a predefined threshold. By developing an analytical model, we derive an appropriate threshold for given payload size and data rate. Simulation results demonstrate that CA-ACK improves the throughput adaptively to channel conditions.