On packet concatenation with QoS support for wireless local area networks

Wireless networks are becoming increasingly popular in the world of telecommunications. IEEE 802.11 standard provides reliable data delivery in wireless LANs. The cost for such reliability is the overhead related to the data transmission at the link layer. In this paper, the application of a packet concatenation algorithm at the IP layer is proposed to the purpose of overhead reduction together with increase of fairness in medium access at the link layer. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated through simulations as well as real experiments. Results underline significant performance enhancements deriving from the use of the proposed packet concatenation algorithm in wireless LANs.