Evaluation of Frame Aggregation in Giga-bit WLANs

Ashraf Ali Bourawy, Takwa Alokap

Recently, the very high throughput (VHT) IEEE 802.11ac amendment has emerged as the fifth generation of wireless local area networks (WLANs). Enhancements to the physical and MAC layers have been defined which elevate the data rate to 6.933 Gbps. The 802.11ac amendment extends the frame size from 8000 bytes to approximately 11454 bytes, which increases the ability to aggregate frames from upper layers. Moreover, frame aggregation is employed in 802.11ac which states that all MAC protocol data units (MPDU) must use the aggregate MPDU (A-MPDU) format. In this paper we evaluate the techniques of frame aggregation adopted by IEEE 802.11ac. In particular, we study the impact of frame aggregation on the system throughput. Simulation results show that frame aggregation is a powerful mechanism in terms of increasing system throughput through reducing overhead in MAC layer.