IEEE 802.11e MAC-level FEC performance evaluation and enhancement
Sunghyun Choi · 2003
We evaluate and enhance the performance of the Forward Error Correction (FEC) scheme being defined in the upcoming IEEE 802.11e Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol. A novel retransmission-combining technique is proposed to enhance the performance of the MAC-level FEC scheme. We also identify a problem with the IEEE 802.11a physical (PHY) layer when it is used with the MAC-level FEC. A new PHY frame format, backward compatible with the original format, is proposed to resolve the problem. Finally, we analytically evaluate the error performance of the MAC-level FEC, and its enhanced performance via retransmission-combining and new 802.11a PHY frame format.