Performance Analysis of the IEEE 802.11n Block-ACK Mechanism in an Error-Prone Channel

Abstract

A Block-ACK mechanism is adopted to improve the performance of WLAN in IEEE 802.11n, through Block-ACK mechanism stations can transmit more MPDUs at one-time and receiver only responds to a single Block-ACK frame, thus the mechanism effectively improves the efficiency of the MAC layer. In this paper, we analyze the saturation throughput of Block-ACK mechanism by considering the freezing of backoff counter, anomalous slots and non-ideal channel, the accuracy of our model is verified by the NS-2 simulation results.