A performance analysis of block ACK scheme for IEEE 802.11e networks

The demand for the IEEE 802.11 wireless local-area networks (WLANs) has been drastically increasing along with many emerging applications and services over WLAN. However, the IEEE 802.11 medium access control (MAC) is known to be limited in terms of its throughput performance due to the high MAC overhead, such as interframe spaces (IFS) or per-frame based acknowledgement (ACK) frame transmissions. The IEEE 802.11e MAC introduces the block ACK scheme for improving the system efficiency of the WLAN. Using the block ACK scheme can reduce the ACK transmission overhead by integrating multiple ACKs for a number of data frames into a bitmap that is contained in a block ACK frame, thus increasing the MAC efficiency. In this paper, we mathematically analyze the throughput and delay performance of the IEEE 802.11e block ACK scheme in an erroneous channel environment. Our extensive ns-2 simulation results validate the accuracy of our analytical model and they further demonstrate that the block ACK scheme enhances the MAC throughput performance at the cost of the resequencing delay at the receiving buffer.