Overcoming performance pitfalls in rate-diverse high speed WLANs

Our analysis leads us to propose a desirable resource allocation for situations of rate-diverse competition, and an architecture for control at the access-point to achieve it. Our implementation is compatible with the standard, involving a combination of known techniques: packet aggregation, multiple queues with TCP-ACK isolation, and control of the MAC contention window. The main contribution here is to provide a practical, comprehensive solution that imposes the desired efficiency and fairness model addressing all the previously indicated limitations. We demonstrate analytically and through extensive simulation that our method is able to provide significant enhancements in performance under a variety of traffic conditions.