IPAC: IP-based Adaptive Packet Concatenation for Multihop Wireless Networks

Because medium contention occurs for each packet that is transmitted in a IEEE 802.11 wireless network, transmission of a large number of small packets can be particularly detrimental to performance. As a result of contention overhead, end-to-end delay and energy dissipation increase and the medium utilization decreases. In this paper, our goal is to reduce contention through concatenation of several small packets into a single large packet, and subsequently transmit this large packet. We propose IPAC, an IP-based packet concatenation protocol that adaptively selects an appropriate packet size based on the route quality. Simulation results show that with IPAC, contention is reduced by a factor of two, resulting in a throughput increase by a factor of two to three.