Finding the Sweet Spot for Frame Aggregation in 802.11 WLANs

Abstract: This letter proposes an algorithm for the dynamic tuning of the maximum size of aggregated frames in 802.11 WLANs. Traffic flows with opposed requirements may coexist in these networks: traditional services as web browsing or file download that need high throughput, and services with realtime requirements that need low latency. The proposed algorithm allows the network manager to find an optimal balance (i.e. the "sweet spot" between throughput and latency: a "delay budget" can be assigned to real-time flows, with the objective of keeping the latency as close as possible to that budget, while penalizing the throughput of traditional services as little as possible.