Experimental Analysis on Performance Anomaly for Download Data Transfer at IEEE 802.11n Wireless LAN

It is reported that, even in IEEE 802.11n wireless local area network (WLAN), the performance anomaly occurs which reduces the throughput of all stations when there are some stations communicating with low data rate. But, the previous paper uses a manually configured environment in the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) uplink performance evaluation. In this paper, we show the results of experiments indicating the performance anomaly at downlink User Datagram Protocol (UDP) and TCP data transfer over 802.11n WLAN. In the experiment, we adopted the actual parameter settings in the stations and the access point, and carefully examined the relationship of the frame aggregation, the queue management at the access point, UDP traffic load, and TCP congestion window size with the performance anomaly. We show that a phenomenon like the performance definitely occurs in both the UDP and TCP data transfer, but the reasons seem to be different for each of them. KeywordsWLAN; IEEE802.11n; Performance Anomaly,