A Packet Aggregation Mechanism for Real Time Applications over Wireless Networks

This work presents a packet aggregation mechanism tailored for real time applications over wireless network environments. In the core of the proposed mechanism lies an elaborated packet holding time estimation. This estimation is used to allow for packet aggregation along a multihop path. The proposed mechanism was evaluated and compared with another prominent packet aggregation scheme. The simulation results have shown that the proposed mechanism is capable to keep jitter and total delay within application bounds. Furthermore, the proposed scheme allows for substantial reduction on the number of packet transmissions as well as the overall packet overhead. The savings in terms of packet transmissions reached nearly 80% in the evaluated scenarios. These results have shown that the proposed scheme is able to cope with varying network link capacity and strict application timing requirements.