Efficiency Analysis of Burst Transmissions with
Block ACK in Contention-Based 802.11e WLANs
Ilenia Tinnirello∗,+,1
∗ +
University of Palermo, ITALY
1 2
ilenia.tinnirello@tti.unipa.it,ilenia@mwnl.snu.ac.kr
Abstract— The channel utilization efficiency of the standard
802.11 networks is severely compromised when high data trans-
mission rates are employed since physical layer headers and
control frames are transmitted at low rate, thus wasting more
channel time proportionally. The extensions defined in the emerg-
ing 802.11e for quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning include some
new mechanisms developed in order to improve the efficiency.
Those include data transmission bursting (referred to as TXOP
operation) and acknowledgment aggregation (referred to as block
ACK). These two features allow to offer new data transmission
services, in which the data delivery and acknowledgment unit
is not a single frame, but a block of frames. In this paper,
we evaluate the performance of these operations for both basic
and RTS/CTS access cases. We quantify how the data bursting
and block ACK mechanisms can affect the system efficiency
for different environments, and derive the maximum achievable
throughput. We also discuss the operating conditions at which the
switch from a channel utilization method to another is desired.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Today’s 802.11 wireless LANs (WLANs) provide multiple
rates for data transmissions by employing different sets of
modulation and channel coding schemes. For example, the
popular 802.11b physical (PHY) layer provides 1, 2, 5.5, and
11 Mbps [7], while the emerging 802.11a and 802.11g provide
6 to 54 Mbps. These multiple transmission rates can be used
for frame transmissions in an adaptive manner depending on
the underlying channel conditions [9], [4]. Specifically, high
data rates can be exploited only by stations which perceive
good channel conditions. Since different stations, in general,
use different data rates, control frames are transmitted at a rate
supported by all the stations, i.e., at one of the rates in the
basic rate set, while the physical header transmission time is
fixed. This constraint affects the channel utilization efficiency
of data transmissions, since the weights of PHY overheads and
control frames (required to access the channel) do not decrease
at the same factor as the payload transmission time reduction.
Therefore, the throughput is increasingly dominated by such
overheads for high data rates.
In order to improve the system efficiency, new operations,
namely, data transmission bursting and aggregated acknowl-
edgments, are being standardized as part of the emerging IEEE
802.11e medium access control (MAC) [8], which is widely
discussed in current literature. While several studies evaluate
the new channel access features [2], [3], few results have been
so far reported about these new transmission operations [10].
The original MAC definition provides a connectionless inter-
face to higher layers, i.e., each frame delivered down from
This work is in part supported by grant number (R08-2004-000-10384-0)
from the basic research program of Korea Science and Engineering Foundation
(KOSEF) and by the italian FIRB research project PRIMO.
3455
0-7803-8938-7/05/$20.00 (C) 2005 IEEE
Sunghyun Choi+,2
Seoul National University, KOREA
schoi@snu.ac.kr
higher layers is treated by the MAC independently of all
others. The revolutionary idea introduced in 802.11e is the
establishment of temporary channel-services for a burst of
frames addressed to the same destination. These frames can
be sent in a single channel access with a common acknowl-
edgment. In this paper, we deal with this new transmission
service.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: In Section
II, we describe the concept of data bursting and block ac-
knowledgment. Then, we in Section III introduce a simple
analytical framework, which allows us to derive the system
performance for different access modes, data burst lengths, and
acknowledgment policies. After we discuss some numerical
results in Section IV, we conclude the paper in Section V.
II. C HANNEL ACCESS AND T RANSMISSION O PERATIONS
In distributed WLAN environments, e.g., based on IEEE
802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF), the mandatory
MAC of the 802.11, a common radio resource (channel) is
shared among a given number of associated users, without
any centralized coordination. The management of the common
medium is specified by two different aspects: (1) the multiple
access resolution, i.e., the rules according to which a given
station acquires the right to use the channel, and (2) the chan-
nel transmission operations, i.e., the rules according to which
the station that wins the contention can perform transmissions
without losing the control of the channel. In this section, we
briefly describe the substantial innovations introduced by the
802.11e extensions regarding the second aspect.
A. Legacy DCF
The 802.11 DCF works on the basis of the well-
known carrier-sense multiple access with collision avoidance
(CSMA/CA) protocol. Whenever a given station has a frame
to transmit, it waits until the channel becomes idle for a
given amount of time (Distributed Interframe Space or DIFS
interval), and then accesses the channel following exponential
backoff rules. If a successful reception occurs, the destination
station responds, after a Short Interframe Space (SIFS) with an
acknowledgment (ACK) frame. Since SIFS < DIFS, no other
stations are able to access the channel between the data and
the ACK frames. These explicit acknowledgments are required
in order to identify transmission failures due to collisions or
channel errors.
Two different access modes, i.e., basic access and request-
to-send/clear-to-send (RTS/CTS) access, provide 2-way and 4-
way handshaking, respectively. In the basic access case, after
the contention resolution, the station is allowed to immediately
transmit the pending data frame. On the other hand, in
the RTS/CTS access case, the data transmission is preceded
by the transmission of special short RTS and CTS control
frames. This operation allows to combat the hidden terminal
phenomenon and to reduce the collision times.
Once the channel access is performed, the station acquires
the right to transmit on the channel an entire Mac Service
Data Unit (MSDU), received from the higher layer, i.e., the
802.2 logical link control (LLC). One or more MAC Protocol
Data Units (MPDUs) can be generated from the MSDU
and forwarded to the underlying PHY. When more than one
MPDUs are generated out of a single MSDU, it is referred to
as a fragmentation. Fragments belonging to the same MSDU
are transmitted back-to-back without a new channel access
operation. That is, after a successful fragment transmission,
the subsequent fragment is transmitted after a SIFS interval
from the end of the ACK corresponding to the previous
fragment. This operation is referred to as fragment burst. If
the RTS/CTS access mode is employed, the whole fragment
burst is preceded by RTS and CTS transmissions. Note that the
transmission unit is represented by a single MSDU delivery,
irrespective of the time required to complete the transmission.
B. IEEE 802.11e EDCA
The emerging 802.11e defines Enhanced Distributed Chan-
nel Access (EDCA) in order to provide differentiated services
among contending stations [8]. Two main features of EDCA
includes: (1) the probability to access the channel can be dif-
ferentiated among stations (or traffic types, exactly speaking);
and (2) the transmission unit can be defined based on the
channel access time. We here skip all the details of the multiple
channel access functions, since this paper focuses on the the
innovative aspects of the transmission and acknowledgment
operations. In fact, once a station wins a contention and starts
its transmission, EDCA specifies new channel utilization rules
based on the transmission opportunity (TXOP) concept and
on the block ACK mechanism.
1) Transmission Opportunity: Under EDCA, each channel
access does not result necessarily in a single MSDU transmis-
sion. The station which wins the contention gains a TXOP.
During a TXOP, one or more MPDUs (eventually belonging
to different MSDUs) can be transmitted in a burst, separated by
SIFS. TXOP is defined by the starting time and the maximum
duration. The starting time is represented by the time when
the medium is determined to be available under the EDCA
access rules; the maximum duration is limited by a threshold,
called TXOP limit, 1 Fragmentation is mandatory whenever
the MSDU transmission duration exceeds the TXOP limit.
2) Block ACK Mechanism: With the 802.11e, a new ac-
knowledgment scheme is also defined in order to reduce
the channel wastes due to the ACK transmissions. Basically,
the block ACK mechanism allows a block of MPDUs to
be transmitted, each separated by a SIFS period, and to
be acknowledged by a final aggregated ACK frame, called
block ACK. The block ACK contains information about the
reception of the whole block through a corresponding bitmap,
1 The TXOP limit is expressed in a 11-bit field in the unit of 32µs, and the
maximum TXOP limit is defined to be 65536µs.
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and it is transmitted after an explicit transmitter request. This
request is performed by a new control frame, called block
ACK request.2 Both the block ACK request and the block
ACK control frames are transmitted at the same rate used for
the data frame transmissions. Before using the block ACK
feature, the transmitter (originator) and the receiver (recipient)
have to exchange some special request/response frames. On
the other hahd, whenever the originator wants to terminate
the block ACK agreement, a specific notification frame has
to be sent to the recipient. After initialization, blocks of
MPDUs can be delivered with a single per-block ACK frame.
After each block ACK, the originator retries to transmit the
corrupted frames either in another burst or individually. The
maximum number of frames in the block is specified, in the
setup phase, according to the recipient reordering buffer size
up to the number of MPDUs that can generated by 64 MSDUs
(i.e., 16 · 64 = 1024). Note that the block size does not
depend on the TXOP limit. In fact, the originator can split the
MPDUs belonging to the same block across different TXOPs.
Therefore, a data block can be composed of several data bursts.
The block ACK request is finally transmitted in the same
TXOP which conclude the block, or in a subsequent TXOP. As
a normal ACK, the block ACK reception is expected before the
expiration of the block ACK timeout. If there is no response,
the block ACK request is retransmitted until the maximum
retry limit is reached.
In order to quickly identify collisions and to reduce the
probability of other stations transmitting during each TXOP,
the head-of-burst (HOB) frame of each new data burst requires
to be protected with an immediate ACK. The data burst
protection mechanism can also be based on the RTS/CTS
frame exchange. In fact, after the successful reception of the
CTS frame, no other station can try to access the channel
during the time interval specified in the RTS/CTS duration
fields.
3) Channel Utilization Examples: According to the em-
ployed access mode and ACK policy, four different channel
utilization cases are possible. We denote each case with a
short acronym as summarized in Table I. Fig 1 shows different
examples of channel utilizations, for a given TXOP limit value.
In each burst, we can identify a channel access overhead (null
for the BI case), due to the time wasted for the transmission
of the control frames required to begin the data transmission
burst. We include in this definition both RTS/CTS frame
exchange and the HOB acknowledgment of the BB case. Once
the data burst is successfully activated, a sequence of identical
transmission units (i.e., single data frame or data frame and
relative ACK) is repeated on the channel. Finally, in the case
of block ACK, some further overheads are required for the
overall data bursts before the channel release.
III. A NALYTICAL F RAMEWORK
In the following, we consider an infrastructure Basic Service
Set (BSS), composed of N stations employing uniform data
2 Actually, there are two types of block ACK mechanisms: immediate and
delayed. In the delayed case, the block ACK request is answered with a
normal ACK and the block ACK is sent by the receiver with the highest
possible priority in a subsequent TXOP of the receiver.
 Immediate ACK Block ACK
Basic BI BB
RTS/CTS RI RB
TABLE I
F OUR COMBINATIONS OF ACCESS MODES AND ACK POLICIES
Fig. 1. Data burst illustration with different access modes and ACK policies:
(a) BI, (b) BB, (c), RI, and (d) RB
rates. Since we are not concerned about the differentiated
channel access of the 802.11e in this work, we assume that
all the stations generate the traffic of the same priority, and
hence have the same probability to win the contention. We
also consider that all the traffic is generated toward a fixed
destination (thus neglecting the block ACK setup phase over-
head) and that the stations work in saturation conditions, i.e.,
data bursts are always available in the transmission queues.
It is easy to understand that the network performance is
affected by two different figures: (1) the probability to have
a successful channel access, and (2) the channel utilization
efficiency. The first figure depends on the number of compet-
ing stations. Remind that we assume the number of competing
stations is constant and equal to N . The second figure depends
on the overhead, in terms of headers, control frames, and
collision times, required for the data transmissions, and it is
a function of the access mode (i.e., basic or RTS/CTS) and
on the acknowledge policy (i.e., immediate or block ACK).
Given the probability Ps to have a successful channel access,
the average per-access utilization time E[slot], and payload
bits E[PT ], the system throughput S can be easily expressed
as:
Ps E[PT ]
S= (1)
E[slot]
Note that E[slot] is given by the sum of two components:
the channel inactivity time due to backoff countdown, and the
channel occupancy time due to successful transmissions or
collisions, i.e.,
E[slot] = σE[bk] + Ps E[Ts ] + (1 − Ps )E[Tc ]
where σ is the backoff slot duration, E[bk] is the average
number of inter-transmission backoff slots, E[Ts ] is the av-
erage successful channel occupancy time, and E[Tc ] is the
average collision time, respectively. Note that Ps and E[bk] are
functions of the number of competing stations, while E[PT ],
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RTS CTS ACK BREQ BACK DATA HP HY
160/r∗ 112/r∗ 112/r∗ 192/r 1216/r (224+P)/r 192
TABLE II
PHY PAYLOAD AND HEADER TRANSMISSION TIMES ( IN µS )
OA OR U
BI 0 0 DATA+2SIFS+ACK
BB ACK+SIFS BREQ+2SIFS+BACK DATA + SIFS
RI RTS+2SIFS+CTS 0 DATA+2SIFS+ACK
RB RTS+2SIFS+CTS BREQ+2SIFS+BACK DATA+SIFS
TABLE III
D ECOMPOSITION OF SUCCESSFUL CHANNEL OCCUPANCY TIMES
E[Ts ], and E[Tc ] depend on the employed access mode and
ACK policy. We deal with the computation of these latter
parameters, while the former ones (Ps and E[bk]) are derived
based on the well-known results given in [1].3
A. Channel occupancy times and payloads
In the 802.11b WLANs, different modulation schemes with
corresponding different data rates (namely, 1, 2, 5.5, and 11
Mbps) are available. Let r be the employed data rate, r∗
the corresponding control frame rate (i.e., the maximum BSS
basic rate equal to or lower than the data rate), and rP HY
the physical header rate in Mbps. We denote the channel
occupancy time of RTS/CTS exchange, standard ACK, block
ACK request, block ACK, and data frames, respectively with
RT S, CT S, ACK, BREQ, BACK, and DAT A. Let P
be the data frame payload. Each frame includes a common
physical header HP HY , whose transmission time has to be
added to the PHY payload time. All the time durations (in µs)
are summarized in Table II. We assume that frame corruptions
are only due to collisions, thus avoiding any channel error
impairment. Therefore, with the assumption of a uniform data
rate among the stations, PT , Ts , and Tc become constant.
Although the block ACK mechanism is very flexible, as we
described in the previous section, in this section we do not
consider any block split among multiple TXOPs. Accordingly,
whenever the new ACK mechanism is employed, each TXOP
is always concluded with a block ACK request and a block
ACK transmission, and hence a data block corresponds to a
single data burst.
In the case of a successful access, the station which wins the
contention can hold the channel up to the TXOP limit time,
and can perform multiple MPDU transmissions. We divide
the channel occupancy time into three different components,
where one or two components can be zero for certain cases:
(1) the channel access overhead OA , (2) the data transmission
burst, and (3) the channel release overhead OR . The data
transmission burst is, in turns, composed of a given number
of unit times U , corresponding to the time required for the
transmission of a single data frame. Table III specifies the
values of these components for the four different access mode
and ACK policy combinations (see Fig. 1). Given the TXOP
limit, the number d of data units transfered in a single channel
3 We use the same notation given in [1] in the case of P , while E[bk] is a
s
function of the Ptr parameter defined in [1] and corresponds to (1−Ptr )/Ptr .
access can be expressed as: 8.5


T XOP − OA − OR 8 Block ACK
d= (2) 7.5
U Unprotected block ACK
7
The successful transmission time and the overall payload are

Throughput [Mbps]
6.5
given by: Immediate ACK
6

E[Ts ] = OA + d · U + OR − SIF S + DIF S (3) 5.5

E[PT ] = d·P 5

4.5 BI
Whenever a collision occurs, the channel is wasted until BB
UB
4
an idle DIFS time occurs. With the assumption of no hidden RI
RB
3.5
terminal, only the head of burst (HOB) frame can be involved 10
in the collision. In fact, after the first successful transmission, TXOP Limit [ms]

all the following control/data frames are separated by a SIFS Fig. 2. Channel utilization comparison for N = 5 and r = 11 Mbps
(< DIFS) time interval, and no other station can access the
channel. Instead, if the first frame collides, the transmitting 8.5

stations lose the channel control. Therefore, the average col- 8

lision time is: 7.5

Block ACK
E[Tc ] = H + DIF S (4) 7

Throughput [Mbps]
where H time is the time required for the HOB transmission, 6.5
Immediate ACK
which is equal to RT S in the case of 4-way handshaking and 6

equal to DAT A in the case of 2-way handshaking. 5.5

B. Block ACK mechanism variants
In this subsection, we describe how the previous framework
can be easily adapted to different block ACK operations. For
example, if no protection mechanism is adopted, i.e., if the
HOB frame is a data frame without a separate immediate ACK,
we have to account for two different issues: the reduction
of the channel access overhead, and the increment of the
channel waste due to a collision. Accordingly, OA = 0 and
E[Tc ] = d · U − SIF S + DIF S. Actually, this operation
(referred to as unprotected block ACK or simply UB in the
following) is not standard-compliant, but is considered for
a comparative purpose. Moreover, the case of data block
splitting in different channel accesses can be easily modeled
by simply considering that the final channel release overhead
has to be divided among all the data bursts belonging to the
same block. If the data block length is B and it is split among
M TXOPs, we have to assume that the release overhead is
reduced by a factor equal to M and that d = B/M . If
the block ACK request is transmitted in a separate channel
access, HOB frame lengths are not fixed for the basic access
case. This requires to compute collision times according to the
expression given in [1] for a general HOB frame distribution.
The probability to have an HOB frame equal to the block
ACK request or to the data frame is, respectively, 1/M and
(M − 1)/M .
IV. N UMERICAL R ESULTS
In this section, we present some numerical results on the
efficiency of five combinations of access modes and ACK
policies in different scenarios. The results have been obtained
from our analytical framework. We consider the 802.11b as
the underlying PHY while the BSS basic rate set is assumed
to include 1 and 2 Mbps. Unless specified otherwise, we use
a constant MSDU size of 1 KBytes.
Unprotected block ACK
5
4.5 BI
BB
4 UB
RI
RB
3.5
10
TXOP Limit [ms]
Fig. 3. Channel utilization comparison for N = 50 and r = 11 Mbps
A. Maximum achievable throughput
Due to the low rate physical header and control frame
transmissions, the 802.11 system efficiency is severely com-
promised as the data rate increases. Both the TXOP and the
block ACK mechanisms allow to improve such efficiency. On
one side, performing multiple transmissions in a single channel
access reduces the weight of the time wastes due to collisions.
On the other side, aggregating the acknowledgments reduces
the control overheads. Fig. 2 shows the network throughput
in the case of N = 5 and r = 11 Mbps, as a function
of the TXOP limit, for all the considered access mode and
ACK policy combinations. Note that the x-axis in the figure
is in a log scale. In the figure, the minimum TXOP value
is 2 ms, which corresponds to a single MPDU transmission
(i.e., d = 1). As the TXOP limit increases, the throughput
curves show a step increment whenever the number of data
unit transmissions is increased by one unit. The standard
802.11 basic access mode (corresponding to the basic access
with TXOP limit = 2 ms and immediate ACK) gives an
overall throughput equal to 5.6 Mbps, which corresponds
to a normalized efficiency of almost 0.5 (= 5.6/11). From
the figure, we see that this throughput can be substantially
increased with the use of the block ACK mechanism up to
8.3 Mbps, with an efficiency of almost 0.75. However, the
block ACK is more effective than the immediate ACK, only
if the block length goes beyond a given threshold (i.e., only if

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 2304 2304
11 Mbps

50@11Mbps
2 Mbps
1000 1000
MPDU Size Threshold [byte]

MPDU Size Threshold [byte]

5.5 Mbps

500 1 Mbps
500
400 10@1Mbps 400
300 300

200 200

50@1Mbps

100 100
Basic Access
RTS/CTS
10 20 30 40 50 60 0 10 20 30 40 50 60
TXOP LImit [ms] TXOP LImit [ms]

Fig. 4. MPDU payload threshold over which the RTS/CTS access is better Fig. 6. MPDU payload threshold under which the block ACK mechanism
than the basic access (both with immediate ACK) vs. TXOP limit is better than the immediate ACK vs. TXOP limit

2304 2304
5@11Mbps
11 Mbps 5@5.5Mbps

1000 1000

MPDU Size Threshold [byte]

MPDU Size Threshold [byte]

11 Mbps
5.5 Mbps

500 500 5@2Mbps

400 5.5 Mbps 400 50@11Mbps
300 300
5@1Mbps
2 Mbps
200 200
50@5.5Mbps
1 Mbps
2 Mbps
100 100
Immediate ACK 1 Mbps
Block ACK
10 20 30 40 50 60 10 20 30 40 50 60
number of stations TXOP LImit [ms]

Fig. 5. MPDU payload threshold over which the RTS/CTS access is better Fig. 7. MPDU payload threshold under which the unprotected block ACK
than the basic access vs. the number of competing stations mechanism is better than the immediate ACK

T XOP > 4 ms). Since the number of active stations is small,
thus resulting in a small collision probability, the RTS/CTS
access mode gives a worse performance than the basic access
mode in both immediate and block ACK cases. Finally, note
that the unprotected block ACK mechanism is also better than
the immediate ACK one for long block transmissions. Fig. 3
shows the network throughput in the case of a higher load
condition, i.e., N = 50. Again, the figure remarks how the
multiple bursts and block ACK features improve the system
efficiency. However, two differences are observed from the
previous case: (1) the RTS/CTS access mode in some cases
gives slightly better performance than the basic access one,
and (2) the unprotected block ACK mechanism is always less
efficient than the immediate ACK. Both observations are due
to the large collision probability experienced in the case of
high load conditions.
B. Efficiency thresholds
As we observed in the previous subsection, given the
payload MPDU length P , the performance of different access
mode and ACK policy combinations depends on the number
of competing stations N and the TXOP limit value. By
comparing two generic utilization mechanisms, which result
in S1 and S2 , respectively, we can conclude that the first
one outperforms the second one (i.e., S1 > S2 ) whenever
the following condition holds:
∆d/d1 > ∆E[slot]/E[slot1 ] (5)
where ∆d = d1 −d2 , and ∆E[slot] = E[slot1 ]−E[slot2 ] and
the subscripts 1 and 2 are used to refer, respectively, to first
method and second method parameters. Given N , and hence
Ps , this condition can be rearranged as a constraint on the
MPDU length P , for each value of TXOP limit. Note that, in
general, since the definition of d involves the floor function, the
solution cannot be expressed by a single threshold value. Note
that the inequality can be satisfied in multiple discontinuous
P ranges.
1) RTS/CTS vs. Basic Access: Fig. 4 shows the MPDU P
ranges in which the RTS/CTS 4-way handshaking is more
advantageous than the 2-way basic access, in the case of
immediate ACK, as the TXOP limit increases. The results
are obtained for different congestion states (i.e., N = 5
and N = 50) and for different data rates (i.e., r = 1 and
r = 11 Mbps). Each curve represents the base threshold value
over which the RTS/CTS access gives a better performance,
with the exception of the the shaded regions, in which the
basic access mode is again better. For example, in the case
of 10 stations at 1 Mbps and TXOP = 10 ms, we observe
that the RTS/CTS access is generally better when P > 430
Bytes. However, the RTS/CTS access works worse whenever

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P belongs to the range of [490, 530] bytes. From the figure, we
see a very interesting result: given N and r, the base threshold
mostly does not depend on the TXOP value, but stays constant.
In fact, when ∆d = 0 (this condition is satisfied in most cases,
since we compare the access modes for a given ACK policy
and then for the same transmission unit U ), Eq. (5) becomes
∆E[slot] < 0. This means that the RTS/CTS method gives
the best performance if the collision time reduction due to
the shorter HOB frame is more significant than the additional
overhead introduced by the RTS/CTS frame exchange, i.e.,
 
Ps
P + 224 > (O A1 − OA2 ) + RT S ·r
1 − Ps
The threshold does not depend on the burst length, and hence
not on the TXOP value either. On the other hand, when
∆d
= 0, the RTS/CTS access transmits fewer MPDUs than the
basic one (actually by one, i.e., ∆d = 1), and it results that the
performance gets worse than the basic access one, irrespective
of ∆E[slot]. This condition is satisfied periodically in the
shaded ranges of Fig. 4. Due to the same reason, some
triangular pulses along the threshold curves are also observed.
Fig. 5 plots the base P threshold value, in both immediate
ACK and block ACK cases, for different data rates, as a
function of the network load conditions. As the data rate
increases, the payload transmission time is shortened, and
hence the threshold grows larger . This implies that only for
highly loaded conditions the 4-way access gives advantage.
For example, in the case of immediate ACK and r = 11
Mbps, only when the number of stations is larger than 23,
the RTS/CTS access mode can be beneficial. Note that the
thresholds are lower whenever the block ACK is used, since
in this case the 2-way/4-way overhead difference is reduced
(due to the ACK required in both cases for the HOB frame).
2) Block ACK vs. Immediate ACK: Fig. 6 shows the MPDU
P ranges, in which the block ACK is more advantageous
than the immediate ACK, as the TXOP limit value increases.
The results are obtained for both basic and RTS/CTS access
modes. From the figure, we observe that, in this case, the P
ranges can be simply represented by a limit curve. Specifically,
the block ACK is more advantageous whenever the MPDU
size is smaller than the limit curve value. Another interesting
conclusion is that the limit curves do not depend on the number
of contending stations. In fact, it can be easily shown that, the
limit condition is reached when the block ACK and immediate
ACK data bursts have the same length. In this condition,
the variation of E[slot] does not depend on the number of
competing stations, since the collision times are constant for
both methods. Whenever d1 results greater than d2 , since
E[slot1 ] cannot be larger than E[slot2 ] + Ps U2 (otherwise,
another data unit transmission could be performed within the
TXOP limit for mechanism 2), it results S1 > S2 , irrespective
of a specific ∆E[slot] value. From the figure, we observe that,
for high data rates, the block ACK is advantageous virtually
in all situations (e.g., for TXOP > 8 ms at 11 Mbps, it is the
best policy for every frame size), while for low data rate, it
can be effective only for small frame transmissions. The trend
does not depend on the access mode employed, although in
the RTS/CTS case the threshold values are slightly larger.
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Fig. 7 shows how the P ranges, in which the block ACK
is more advantageous, change when the HOB frame is not
immediately acknowledged (i.e., unprotected block ACK or
U B case). In this case, the number of contending stations is
a very important parameter. For high collision probability and
low data rate (e.g., N = 50 and r < 5.5 Mbps), U B is not
advantageous at all. Only for low collision probability cases,
it can be useful, although the P maximum size (which result
almost independent on the TXOP value for long transmission
burst) is strongly reduced in comparison with the previous
case.
V. C ONCLUSIONS
In this paper, we analyze the performance of new channel
utilization mechanisms, based on data burst transmissions,
supported by the emerging IEEE 802.11e. We develop an
analytical framework to evaluate the impact of different access
modes (i.e., 2-way/4-way handshaking) and acknowledgment
policies (i.e., immediate/block ACK) on the overall system
performance. Through the analytical modeling, we show that,
given a MPDU size and a TXOP limit, the access mode and
the ACK policy have a great impact on the overall system
throughput, and some optimizations are possible. For example,
we prove that the block ACK is generally not useful for low
data rates and low TXOP values, while it is very attractive for
high data rate transmissions. Another interesting conclusion
is that the optimal selection between immediate and block
ACK does not depend on the number of contending stations.
We quantify these comparisons by providing the efficiency
thresholds needed to select the best possible mechanism.
Finally, we discuss the role of the block ACK protection
mechanisms, i.e., of the HOB immediate ACK. For the space
limitations, we have omitted some results and generalizations,
including the data block splitting among different TXOPs, in
this paper.
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