Concatenation and piggyback mechanisms for the IEEE 802.11 MAC

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 been 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: a concatenation mechanism and a piggyback mechanism. Performance analysis is conducted with simulations. Studies show that both proposed schemes have greatly improved the system performance.