Research And Simulation Of The Performance Of The MAC Layer Of 802.11n

The rapid development of Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) has not yet broken the bottleneck that the low transmission speed hinders the further development of WLAN. But now, some key technologies for next generation mobile communication can solve the problem by supporting high-speed transmission and ensuring reliable performance. IEEE 802.11n has made general amendment to 802.11. Based on IEEE 802.11n, the transmission speed can be doubled by the application of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) technologies on the physical layer; and the enhanced Medium Access Control (MAC) system performance, optimized data frame and improved network throughput can be achieved by the adoption of frame convergence, link adaptation technologies on the MAC layer.This article mainly focuses on performance of MAC layer of 802.11n. First, we overview the history and development of WLAN. Secondly we introduce the structure and the basic 802.11 protocol. Then we analyses the new algorithms that can improve the throughput of WLAN. In the last chapter, we first introduce the Network Simulation tool NS-2, and then simulate and analysis the algorithms mentioned above.