Multilevel Modulation Based Differentiated Data Aggregation for Wireless LANs

Data aggregation is a mechanism in which multiple frames are transmitted to a receiver, followed by a single acknowledgment. Compared with the typical acknowledgement scheme, the aggregation mechanism has the advantage of amortizing the network overhead over multiple frames for improved throughput performance. In this paper we propose a novel cross-layer based differentiated data aggregation scheme, which combines data aggregation at MAC layer and multilevel modulation at physical layer to increase the transmission efficiency of IEEE 802.11 based WLANs. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms current data aggregation scheme up to 25%