Efficient Block ACK Scheme for Reducing the Number of Retransmitted Frames in IEEE 802.11n Wireless LANs

Abstract

IEEE 802.11n standard has introduced the new schemes in MAC and PHY layers to improve network throughput. Frame aggregation and Block ACK are mainly defined to increase the efficiency of the MAC layer. There exists still problem in IEEE 802.11n. When block ACK request and/or response frames are missing or received in error, the sender does not know the status (success/failure) of each frame in the aggregated large frame and retransmits all the frames. This can cause a lower network performance. To solve this problem, we propose a new effective scheme, called reduced retransmission of MPDUs (RRM) scheme. In the proposed scheme, when a sender does not receive a block ACK response frame, it just transmits a next data frame and requests a block ACK. Therefore, it can retransmits the erroneous frames. Performance of the proposed scheme is investigated by simulation. Our results show that the proposed scheme is very effective and improves the performance under a wide range of channel error conditions.