Boosting Video Capacity of IEEE 802.11n through Multiple Receiver Frame Aggregation

The technology based on the IEEE 802.11 standard has been hugely successful, and is evolving towards even higher speeds and richer features. In particular, the 802.11n amendment of the standard aims to achieve the physical layer (PHY) rate of 600 Mbps. Although the 802.11n offers sufficient bandwidth to support high-resolution video applications such as high definition TV (HDTV), we find that the number of video streams that can be supported on the IEEE 802.11n networks depends heavily on how the frame aggregation is implemented. In addition to the frame aggregation scheme stipulated in the amendment, we explore a multiple-receiver frame aggregation scheme for video traffic. The comparative study reveals through extensive simulation that the proposed multiple-receiver aggregation scheme increases the number of supported video streams by a factor of 2 or higher. We also shed light on the qualitative difference in the dynamics of the two approaches. Whereas the aggregation efficiency worsens with traffic increase in the point-to-point aggregation (which is highly undesirable), the proposed multiple- receiver aggregation exhibits resiliency against congestion, by matching the aggregation efficiency to the traffic load.