Abstract
Frame aggregation technique is a milestone in 802.11-based Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) progress. Firstly defined by the 802.11n amendment for High throughput (HT) WLANs, this technique supports two forms of aggregation; MAC service Data unit aggregation (A-MSDU) and MAC Protocol Data Unit Aggregation (A-MPDU). Regarding its great impact on performance enhancement, this technique is also supported by the upcoming amendments. Indeed, the use of A-MPDU aggregation is compulsory in 802.11ac-based WLANs. In spite that the standard provides a detailed specification of A-MPDU technique implementation, an alternative approach is adopted by the majority of 802.11 card drivers. However, no investigations on the reasons behind the resort to an alternative implementation have been provided in the research literature. In this paper, we conduct a series of assessments to compare the performance of the conventional A-MPDU aggregation scheme called the greedy scheme and the alternative scheme known as the conservative scheme for multimedia traffics of different types in terms of throughput and delay. Next, guidelines on the choice of the most suitable scheme for a given scenario are outlined.