IEEE 802.11 performance enhancement via concatenation and piggyback mechanisms

The IEEE 802.11 medium access control (MAC) is a very robust protocol for the best effort service in the wireless medium. However, many studies have reported that it is not very efficient. One of the fundamental problems of MAC inefficiency is overhead. In this paper, we propose two novel mechanisms to reduce overhead of the IEEE 802.11 protocols: 1) concatenation mechanism (CM); and 2) piggyback mechanism (PM). Performance analysis is conducted under both the best-case scenario and the saturation scenario. Studies show that both proposed schemes have greatly improved the system performance.