Novel length aware packet aggregation and coding scheme for multi-hop wireless LANs

This paper proposes a length aware packet aggregation and coding (LAPAC) scheme that uses packet aggregation and network coding (NC) to improve the throughput of single-relay multi-user wireless networks. Besides, this paper clarifies that the throughput is improved by optimizing the minimum contention window sizes in the IEEE 802.11 based single-relay multi-user wireless networks with LAPAC subject to the constraint achieving fairness between uplink and downlink flows. Computer simulation results show that the throughput of the LAPAC scheme is about 10% higher than that of the conventional ones. The optimized minimum contention window sizes are derived by computer simulations and theoretical analysis. The optimized minimum contention window sizes obtained from theoretical analysis are in good agreement with those obtained from computer simulations, when the number of wireless stations is less than or equal to 15. Furthermore this paper shows that LAPAC scheme outperforms the conventional ones in the case of not only single-rate networks but also multi-rate networks.