A Practical Unacknowledged Unicast Transmission in IEEE 802.11 Networks

• Hyun Yang,
• Jin Seok Yun,
• Jun Seok Oh,
• Chang Yun Park,

Vol. 5, No. 3, March 30, 2011
10.3837/tiis.2011.03.004, Download Paper (Free):

• IEEE 802.11
• Wireless LAN
• energy-efficient communication
• unacknowledged transmission

Abstract

In current IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN, every unicast transmission requires an ACK from the receiver for reliability, though it consumes energy and bandwidth. There have been studies to remove or reduce ACK overhead, especially for energy efficiency. However none of them are practically used now. This paper introduces a noble method of selective unacknowledged transmission, where skipping an ACK is dynamically decided frame by frame. Utilizing the fact that a multicast frame is transmitted without accompanying an ACK in 802.11, the basic unacknowledged transmission is achieved simply by transforming the destination address of a frame to a multicast address. Since removing ACK is inherently more efficient but less strict, its practical profit is dependent on traffic characteristics of a frame as well as network error conditions. To figure out the selective conditions, energy and performance implications of unacknowledged transmission have been explored. Extensive experiments show that energy consumption is almost always reduced, but performance may be dropped especially when TCP exchanges long data with a long distance node through a poor wireless link. An experiment with a well-known traffic model shows that selective unacknowledged transmission gives energy saving with comparable performance.

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