Throughput Enhancement with Fragment Retransmission for Very High-

Speed WLANs

SYNOPSIS

Wireless communications is, by any measure, the fastest growing segment of the

communications industry. As such, it has captured the attention of the media and the imagination

of the public. Increasingly, organizations are finding that Wireless Local Area Networks

(WLANs) are an indispensable adjunct to traditional wired Local Area Networks (LANs), to

satisfy requirements for mobility, relocation, ad hoc networking and coverage of locations

difficult to wire. However, many technical challenges remain in designing robust wireless

networks that deliver the performance necessary to support emerging applications. Wireless

LANs provide high-speed data within a small region, e.g. a campus or small building, as users

move from place to place. WLANs include IEEE 802.11a, IEEE 802.11b, IEEE 802.11g and

IEEE 802.11n.

IEEE 802.11 allows for fragmentation tuning and rate selection to achieve highest

throughput. The aim of this thesis is to develop a mathematical model that improves the

throughput through fragmented transmission in IEEE 802.11b over AWGN and fading channels.

The maximum rate that the data can be transmitted with IEEE 802.11b is only 11 Mbps in the 2.4

GHz band.

An extension to 802.11 specification was developed by the IEEE for wireless LAN

(WLAN) technology. 802.11n builds upon previous 802.11 standards by adding multiple-input

multiple-output (MIMO). IEEE 802.11n with a significant increase in the maximum raw data

rate from 54 Mbit/s to 600 Mbit/s with the use of four spatial streams at a channel width of

40 MHz The additional transmitter and receiver antennas allow for increased data throughput
through spatial multiplexing and increased range by exploiting the spatial diversity through

coding schemes like Alamouti coding. The speed is 100 Mbit/s (even 250 Mbit/s in PHY level),

and so up to 4-5 times faster than 802.11g. 802.11n also offers a better operating distance than

current networks. To achieve high efficiency at the medium access control (MAC) layer, a novel

scheme called aggregation with fragment retransmission (AFR) was developed in IEEE 802.11n.

In the AFR scheme, multiple packets are aggregated into and transmitted in a single large frame.

If errors happen during the transmission, only the corrupted fragments of the large frame are

retransmitted. This thesis also evaluates the throughput and delay performance of AFR over

noisy channels.