Multipacket Reception Enabled Aggregation for Very High-Speed WLANs

In order to improve MAC layer efficiency for future very high-speed WLAN such as IEEE 802.11n, one-to-many aggregation has been proposed where multiple packets desti ned to multiple receivers are aggregated into one large frame wh ich is then transmitted. On receiving successfully a frame, eac h receiver in this scheme sends back an ACK in sequence. The overhead caused by the multiple ACK transmissions however greatly restricts the effectiveness of aggregation. Fortu nately, due to the recent development of signal processing and antenna a rr y techniques, it is now possible to achieve multipacket recep tion (MPR) where, even though there are multiple simultaneous transmissions, the physical layer can still separate signa ls from different users. In this paper, we exploit the use of this tec hnique for decoding multiple ACKs in one-to-many aggregation. In particular, we show by theoretical analysis that while onetomany aggregation alone achieves reasonable improvements, MPR enabled one-to-many aggregation achieves fundamental imp rovements over the non-MPR version one. In fact, the effectivene ss of such one-to-many aggregation is comparable to that of one to-one aggregation which is a key technique for achieving hi gh throughput efficiency in future WLANs.