Power saving efficiency of a novel packet aggregation scheme for high-throughput WLAN stations at different data rates

Multiple MCS and receiver aggregation (MMRA) is a method to aggregate several MAC protocol data units (MPDUs) that are intended for different receivers and can be transmitted at different modulation and coding schemes (MCS) in the next generation of WLAN, the IEEE 802.11n protocol. Traditional aggregation schemes only link MPDUs between the same source and destination device pair together. The main purpose of aggregation is to reduce the number of access attempts to the medium and thereby significantly increase the protocol efficiency and data throughput. Analytical computations show that MMRA performs better not only in time efficiency compared to other single-rate aggregation schemes, where MPDUs aggregates belonging to different receivers are limited to the lowest MCS, but above all MMRA outperforms single-rate aggregation schemes in terms of power efficiency. MMRA provides a power saving frame format structure, which will allow receiving stations to reduce power consumption and save battery life, crucial for small handled devices.