MAC performance analysis and enhancement 100 Mbps data rates for IEEE 802.11

The IEEE 802.11 specifications provide up to 54 Mbps data rate. Furthermore, the industry is seeking higher data rates (HDR's) over 100 Mbps for IEEE 802.11a extension. In this paper, we explore the overhead of HDR's to find out whether the MAC is good enough for the increasing data rates and what to expect as the industry seeks much higher data rates. We prove that a theoretical throughput upper limit and a theoretical delay lower limit exist for IEEE 802.11 protocols. The existence of such limits indicates that the overhead must be reduced to get good performance for HDR's. In order to reduce overhead, we introduce a burst transmission and acknowledgement (BTA) mechanism, in which, instead of acknowledging each packet, a burst of packets is received first, and then the whole burst is acknowledged one time.