Capacity Analysis of Enhanced MAC in IEEE 802.11n

An analytical model for studying the access point (AP)-bottleneck effect of infrastructure wireless local area networks (WLANs) is developed. We extend the analytical model to investigate the performance of some enhanced MAC mechanisms in IEEE 802.11n. Two new aggregation schemes are also proposed and compared with previous schemes. We show that these MAC enhancements can effectively improve the network capacity by not only reducing the protocol overheads, but also smoothing the AP-bottleneck effect. Voice capacity of an IEEE 802.11n WLAN using different MAC mechanisms are presented as well.