Achievable Performance of IEEE 802.11n MIMO adapted WLANs with MAC Enhancements

IEEE 802.11n has brought different modifications to the PHY and MAC layer specifications of the original IEEE 802.11 standard to address the ever increasing demand of the higher throughput. It not only has introduced MIMO technology at the PHY layer, but also various features like frame aggregation, bi-directional data flow, and block acknowledgement at the MAC layer. The adoption of MIMO technology in the PHY layer boosts up the raw channel rate while the enhanced MAC features mitigate the transmission overheads. Various analytical and empirical studies have attempted to characterize the effects of such PHY and MAC enhancements in the overall performance of the network. To supplement those studies, in this paper, we present the bounding (maximum achievable) performance of such enhancements considering the throughput and delay performance measures.