A Novel Adaptive Scheme to Improve the Performance of the IEEE 802.11n WLANs

With the advent of the IEEE 802.11n standard , that uses multiple input multiple output (MIMO) technology at the physical layer, there has been awareness about harnessing the physical layer techniques to improve the performance of a wireless local area network (WLAN) system. Our proposed scheme adoptively changes the number of antennas and the modulation scheme based on the channel conditions and type of traffic. Dynamic frame aggregation at the MAC layer is also proposed based on the channel conditions. The proposed scheme shows marked overall system improvement in terms of throughput and lesser number of automatic repeat requests (ARQ), with better overall channel utilization.