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CLACK: Cross-layer ACK-Aided Opportunistic Transmission in Wireless Networks

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Abstract

Wi-Fi has gained tremendous attention from the research community, yielding successful technological advancements. However, the data throughput efficiency (the ratio of application throughput to the maximum achievable physical data rate) degrades rapidly as the PHY data rate increases when using the current 802.11 medium access control (MAC) protocol. To address this MAC inefficiency, many protocols have been introduced and standardized. This paper describes and examines these state-of-the-art enhancements to MAC efficiency for the 802.11 standard, and proposes a CLACK (Cross-Layer ACK) method that tackles this issue in totally different manner to those previous schemes. The main idea is simple: When a receiver sends an ACK, it transmits the data using the ACK transmission opportunity, and avoids channel contention necessary for data transmissions. The receiver’s short signature is piggybacked in the PHY instead of the MAC to acknowledge the packet reception. We have implemented CLACK using USRP toolkits and GNU Software Define Radio. Our implementation demonstrates the feasibility of our key techniques for both PHY and MAC design. Further, we use detailed simulation to evaluate CLACK in general wireless environments under different traffic loads and varying channel conditions. Our results show that CLACK gains up to 52 % in terms of throughput, when compared to the basic 802.11 scheme, and up to 18 % when compared to existing advanced 802.11e/n schemes.

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Acknowledgments

We owe special thanks to the editor and anonymous reviewers for their thorough and helpful feedback, which was tremendously vital to significantly improve the contents and presentation of this paper. This work was in part supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MEST) (No.201208302002) and supported in part by the IT R&D Program of MKE/KEIT [10035708, “The Development of CPS (Cyber-Physical Systems) Core Technologies for High Confidential Autonomic Control Software”] and supported in part by the Industrial Strategic Technology Development Program (10041861, Development of Wired/Wireless i-AVB System Technology for Concurrent Transmission of HD Media and Control Data) funded by the Ministry of Knowledge Economy(MKE, Korea)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of CSE, Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea

    Suchul Lee & Chong-kwon Kim

  2. Samsung Electronics, Suwon-si, Republic of Korea

    Jiwoong Jeong

  3. Korea Telecom, Seoul, South Korea

    Taemin Park

  4. Kangwon National University, Chuncheon, South Korea

    Jun-Rak Lee

Authors
  1. Suchul Lee
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  2. Jiwoong Jeong
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  3. Taemin Park
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  4. Jun-Rak Lee
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  5. Chong-kwon Kim
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Correspondence to Suchul Lee.

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Lee, S., Jeong, J., Park, T. et al. CLACK: Cross-layer ACK-Aided Opportunistic Transmission in Wireless Networks. Wireless Pers Commun 72, 15–34 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-013-0998-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-013-0998-y

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