Frame-Aggregated Link Adaptation Protocol for Next Generation Wireless Local Area Networks

The performance of wireless networks is affected by channel conditions. Link Adaptation techniques have been proposed to improve the degraded network performance by adjusting the design parameters, for example, the modulation and coding schemes, in order to adapt to the dynamically changing channel conditions. Furthermore, due to the advancement of the IEEE 802.11n standard, the network goodput can be enhanced with the exploitation of its frame aggregation schemes. However, none of the existing link adaption algorithms are designed to consider the feasible number of aggregated frames that should be utilized for channel-changing environments. In this paper, a frame-aggregated link adaptation (FALA) protocol is proposed to dynamically adjust system parameters in order to improve the network goodput under varying channel conditions. For the purpose of maximizing network goodput, both the optimal frame payload size and the modulation and coding schemes are jointly obtained according to the signal-to-noise ratio under specific channel conditions. The performance evaluation is conducted and compared to the existing link adaption protocols via simulations. The simulation results show that the proposed FALA protocol can effectively increase the goodput performance compared to other baseline schemes, especially under dynamically-changing environments.