Packet concatenation at the IP level for performance enhancement in wireless local area networks

Dzmitry Kliazovich, Fabrizio Granelli
2007 Wireless networks  
Wireless local area networks experience performance degradation in presence of small packets. The main reason for that is the large overhead added at the physical and link layers. This paper proposes a concatenation algorithm which groups IP layer packets prior to transmission, called PAC-IP. As a result, the overhead added at the physical and the link layers is shared among the grouped packets. Along with performance improvement, PAC-IP enables packet-based fairness in medium access as well as
more » ... includes QoS support module handling delay-sensitive traffic demands. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated through both simulations and an experimental WLAN testbed environment covering the single-hop and the widespread infrastructure network scenarios. Obtained results underline significant performance enhancement in different operating scenarios and channel conditions. Keywords Packet concatenation . WLAN performance optimization . IEEE 802.11 WLAN performance in presence of small packets According to the statistics presented by researchers [2], the majority (over 85%) of Internet traffic is TCP-based. The Springer Wireless Netw (
doi:10.1007/s11276-006-0734-6 fatcat:2ydul2heevfehaylf3ru6fk2cm