Finding the Sweet Spot for Frame Aggregation in 802.11 WLANs

TL;DR

This paper introduces a dynamic algorithm for optimizing frame aggregation in 802.11 WLANs to balance throughput and latency, accommodating diverse traffic requirements in real-time network management.

Contribution

It presents a novel algorithm that dynamically tunes frame aggregation size to optimize the trade-off between throughput and latency in WLANs.

Findings

Effective balance between throughput and latency achieved

Algorithm adapts to varying traffic demands

Improved quality of service for real-time applications

Abstract

This letter proposes an algorithm for the dynamic tuning of the maximum size of aggregated frames in 802.11 WLANs. Traffic flows with opposed requirements may coexist in these networks: traditional services as web browsing or file download that need high throughput, and services with realtime requirements that need low latency. The proposed algorithm allows the network manager to find an optimal balance (i.e. the "sweet spot" between throughput and latency: a "delay budget" can be assigned to real-time flows, with the objective of keeping the latency as close as possible to that budget, while penalizing the throughput of traditional services as little as possible.