MoFA: Mobility-aware Frame Aggregation in Wi-Fi

IEEE 802.11n WLAN supports frame aggregation called aggregate MAC protocol data unit (A-MPDU) as a key MAC technology to achieve high throughput. While it has been generally accepted that aggregating more subframes results in higher throughput by reducing protocol overheads, our measurements reveal various situations where the use of long A-MPDU frames frequently leads to poor performance in time-varying environments. Especially, since mobility intensifies the time-varying nature of the wireless channel, the current method of channel estimation conducted only at the beginning of a frame reception is insufficient to ensure robust delivery of long A-MPDU frames. Based on extensive experiments, we develop MoFA, a standard-compliant mobility-aware A-MPDU length adaptation scheme with ease of implementation. Our prototype implementation in commercial 802.11n devices shows that MoFA achieves the throughput 1.8x higher than a fixed duration setting (i.e., 10 ms, the maximum frame duration according to IEEE 802.11n standard). To our best knowledge, this is the first effort to optimize the A-MPDU length for commercial 802.11n.