An Experimental Comparison of Burst Packet Transmission Schemes in IEEE 802.11-Based Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are wireless multihop networks comprised of mesh routers, which relay traffic on behalf of clients and other nodes. Using the standard IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) as MAC layer, a node needs to contend for the medium each time it wants to transmit a packet. This creates high overhead in particular for small packets and leads to poor performance for real-time applications such as Voice over IP (VoIP) or online gaming. Burst packet transmission can increase the efficiency. For example, with the Transmission Opportunity limit (TXOPlimit) in IEEE 802.11e, a station may transfer several packets without contending for the channel in between. Similarly, IP packet aggregation combines several IP packets together and sends them as one MAC Service Data Unit. Originally, both schemes have been developed for singlehop networks only. Thus the impact on WMNs is unclear if the packets need to contend over multiple hops. In this paper, we use measurements from a 9-node WMN testbed to compare TXOPs and IP packet aggregation for VoIP in terms of fairness, network capacity and quality of user experience. We show that for low networks loads, both TXOPs and IP packet aggregation increase the VoIP quality compared to IEEE 802.11 DCF. However, in highly loaded networks IP packet aggregation outperforms the other schemes.