Dynamic Packet Aggregation to Solve Performance Anomaly in 802.11 Wireless Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a dynamic packet aggregation method for 802.11 wireless networks that adapts to medium busy time, improving fairness, reactivity, and efficiency in addressing the performance anomaly.

Contribution

It presents a novel dynamic interval-based packet aggregation approach that enhances fairness and responsiveness over fixed-interval methods.

Findings

Improved fairness in wireless network performance.

Enhanced reactivity to medium busy time changes.

Potential efficiency gains in packet transmission.

Abstract

In the widely used 802.11 standard, the so called performance anomaly is a well known issue. Several works have tried to solve this problem by introducing mechanisms such as packet fragmentation, backoff adaptation, or packet aggregation during a fixed time interval. In this paper, we propose a novel approach solving the performance anomaly problem by packet aggregation using a dynamic time interval, which depends on the busy time of the wireless medium. Our solution differs from other proposition in the literature because of this dynamic time interval, which allows increasing fairness, reactivity, and in some cases efficiency. In this article, we emphasize the performance evaluation of our proposal.