On Achieving Maximum Channel Utilization for IEEE 802.11n WLAN

Channel Utilization is a performance index to measure the protocol efficiency of a WLAN medium access control (MAC). This paper presents a simple method to achieve maximum channel utilization for the IEEE 802.11n using basic Distributed Coordination Function (DCF). We find that the channel utilization only depends on the number of stations for the IEEE 802.11n with a given maximum aggregated frame size. One only needs to select a proper value for the minimum contention window size to achieve maximum channel utilization. Our method is verified by simulation and we also analyze the frame delay characteristics.