On the Performance of IEEE 802.11n Protocol

The 802.11n standard promises to extend todays most popular WLAN standard by significantly increasing reach, reliability, and throughput. Ratified on September 2009, this standard defines many new physical layer and medium access control (MAC) layer enhancements. These enhancements aim to provide a data transmission rate of up to 600 Mbps. Since June 2007, 802.11n products are available on the enterprise market based on the draft 2.0. In this paper we investigate the effect of most of the proposed 802.11n MAC and physical layer features on the adhoc networks performance. We have performed several experiments in real conditions. The experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of 802.11n enhancement. We have also examined the interoperability and fairness of 802.11n. We finally propose a new frame aggregation scheduler that considers specific QoS requirements for multimedia applications. We dynamically adjust the aggregated frame size based on frame's access category defined in 802.11e standard.