Throughput enhancement by cross-layer header compression in WLANs

A major limiting factor in increasing the throughput of wireless networks has been the bottleneck of prohibitive signaling overhead. A number of header compression schemes have been proposed to solve this particular problem. These, however, come with their set of limitations and suffer from a loss of practicality in certain cases. Our contribution in this paper is two-fold; firstly, we propose a practical framework for cross-layer header compression which improves vastly on existing data rates (by more than 25% of raw throughput at high SNRs). This is achieved by applying independent compression algorithms to both MAC and PHY data units, thus ensuring better throughput. Secondly, we analyze the performance of proposed scheme in slow fading as well as fast fading environments to demonstrate robustness.