Adaptive packetization for error-prone transmission over 802.11 WLANs with hidden terminals
Collision and fading are the two main sources of packet loss in wireless local area networks (WLANs) and as such, both are affected by the packetization at the medium access control (MAC) layer.While a larger packet is preferred to balance protocol header overhead, a shorter packet is less vulnerable to packet loss due to channel fading errors or staggered collisions in the presence of hidden terminals. Direct collisions due to backoff are not affected by packet size. Recently, Krishnan et. al. have developed a new technique for estimating probabilities of various components of packet loss, namely, direct and staggered collisions and fading. Motivated by this work, in this paper, we exploit ways in which packetization can be used to improve throughput performance of WLANs. We first show analytically that the effective throughput is a unimodal function of the packet size when considering both channel fading and staggered collisions. We then develop a measurement-based algorithm based on golden section search to arrive at an optimal packet size for MAC-layer transmissions. Our simulations demonstrate that packetization based on our search algorithm can greatly improve the effective throughput of sensing-limited nodes, and reduce video frame transfer delay in WLANs.