Throughput enhancement through dynamic fragmentation in wireless LANs

Many rate-adaptive MAC protocols have been proposed in the past for wireless local area networks (LANs) to enhance the throughput based on channel information. Most of these protocols are receiver based and employ the RTS/CTS collision avoidance handshake specified in the IEEE 802.11 standard. However, these protocols have not considered the possibility of bursty transmission of fragments in the corresponding rate adaptation schemes. In this article, a rate-adaptive protocol with dynamic fragmentation is proposed to enhance the throughput based on fragment transmission bursts and channel information. Instead of using one fragmentation threshold in the IEEE 802.11 standard, we propose to use multiple thresholds for different data rates so more data can be transmitted at higher data rates when the channel is good. In our proposed scheme, whenever the rate for the next transmission is chosen based on the channel information from the previous fragment transmission, a new fragment is then generated using the fragment threshold for the new rate. In this way, the channel condition can be more effectively used to squeeze more bits into the medium. We evaluate this scheme under a time-correlated fading channel model and show that the proposed scheme achieves much higher throughput than other rate-adaptive protocols.