Packet Concatenation at the IP Level for Performance Enhancement in Wireless Local Area Networks

Wireless local area networks experience performance degradation in presence of small packets. The main reason for that is the large overhead added at the physical and link layers. This paper proposes a concatenation algorithm which groups IP layer packets prior to transmission, called PAC-IP. As a result, the overhead added at the physical and the link layers is shared among the grouped packets. Along with performance improvement, PAC-IP enables packet-based fairness in medium access as well as includes QoS support module handling delay-sensitive traffic demands. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated through both simulations and an experimental WLAN testbed environment covering the single-hop and the widespread infrastructure network scenarios. Obtained results underline significant performance enhancement in different operating scenarios and channel conditions.