Aggregation-aware routing in wireless multi-hop networks with frame aggregation

Recently, two trends in wireless communication are observable. First, traffic patterns tend to be unsaturated, due to an enormous increase of traffic types like mobile video and voice streaming. Second, new standards like IEEE 802.11n or IEEE 802.11ac allow huge physical data rates up to several Gbit/s. However, to utilize these data rates an efficient usage of the new frame aggregation feature is necessary. We formulate an analytical model that captures the impact of frame aggregation on routing and transform it into an integer linear program. Furthermore, we propose a heuristic approach that simplifies the computational complexity and show both through extensive simulations and real-world testbed experiments that an aggregation-aware routing scheme helps to efficiently aggregate several unsaturated flows and leads to decreased end-to-end delay and decreased contention in wireless multi-hop networks.