DAWL: A Delayed-ACK Scheme for MAC-Level Performance Enhancement of Wireless LANs

The IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol provides a reliable link layer using Stop & Wait ARQ. The cost for high reliability is the overhead due to acknowledgement packets in the direction opposite to the actual data flow. In this paper, the design of a new protocol as an enhancement of IEEE 802.11 is proposed, with the aim of reducing supplementary traffic overhead and increasing the bandwidth available for actual data transmission. The performance of the proposed protocol is evaluated through comparison with IEEE 802.11 as well as with a SSCOP-based protocol. Results underline significant advantages of the proposed protocol against existing ones, thus confirming the value and potentiality of the approach.Dzmitry Kliazovich received his Masters degree in telecommunication science from Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics in 2002. He is currently working towards the Ph.D. degree in University of Trento, Italy. His main research interest lies in wireless networking field with a focus on performance optimization and cross-layer design.Fabrizio Granelli was born in Genoa in 1972. He received the “Laurea” (M.Sc.) degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Genoa, Italy, in 1997, with a thesis on video coding, awarded with the TELECOM Italy prize, and the Ph.D. degree in Electronic Engineering and Computer Science from the same university in 2001. Since 2000 he is carrying on his teaching activity as Assistant Professor at the Dept. of Information and Communication Technologies (DIT) of the University of Trento (Italy) within the B.Sc. and M.Sc. Degrees in Telecommunications Engineering.The research interests of Dr. Granelli are mainly focused on networking, with particular attention to network modeling and performance evaluation, wireless networks, access control, and next-generation telecommunication networks.He is author of more than 30 refereed papers, published in several international journals and conferences.Dr. Granelli is member of the IEEE Committee on “Communication Systems Integration and Modeling” (CSIM) and of the Technical Programme Committee of the “QoS and Performance Evaluation Symposium” of the International Conference on Communications (ICC 2003 and ICC 2004).