B. MAC Enhancements
802.11n introduces, as a pivotal part of its MAC enhancements,
two different kinds of frame aggregations comprising
of A-MSDU and A-MPDU in order to improve its MAC
efficiency. It is also possible to combine both A-MSDU and
A-MPDU which is referred as hybrid A-MSDU/A-MPDU aggregation
hereinafter. Readers are referred to [7] for a detailed
description of these three frame aggregation mechanisms. On
the other hand, the key MAC enhancements of 802.11ac are
centered around its capability of multi-channel operations. In
particular, the 802.11ac supports enhanced A-MSDU and AMPDU
in which the maximum A-MSDU size and maximum
A-MPDU size are increased from 7935 to 11406 bytes (excluding
overhead from security encapsulation) and 65535 to
1048575 bytes, respectively, for further improvement in its
MAC efficiency along with higher PHY data rates.
Further, owing to its multi-channel capability, 802.11ac supports
enhanced protection in which the RTS/CTS handshake
mechanism is modified to support static or dynamic bandwidth
reservation and carry the channel bandwidth information. The
idea is that both RTS and CTS frames are transmitted by VHT
STA using the non-high-throughput (non-HT) duplicate PHY
convergence procedure (PLCP) protocol data unit (PPDU)
upon successful clear channel assessment. Accordingly, the
duplication of a 20 MHz non-HT transmission in every
adjacent 20 MHz channel of a wider channel bandwidth
provides backward compatibility with legacy devices. In this
way, legacy STAs could decode the RTS and CTS frames
and update their network allocation vector to prevent hidden
terminal problem, which will escalate with the multi-channel
operations of 802.11ac, on the secondary channels of a VHT
STA. Additionally, the channel bandwidth information in the
RTS and CTS frames together with the 802.11ac channelization
will enable neighboring VHT STAs to gain knowledge of
the VHT STA’s secondary channels.
The 802.11ac also provides the support of VHT capabilities
such as transmit beamforming (TxBF) control with
sounding protocol and compressed beamforming feedback,
downlink multi-user, multiple input, multiple output (DL MUMIMO),
and VHT transmission opportunity (TXOP) power
save through its VHT Capabilities Info field of the management
frame. The sounding protocol is necessary for TxBF and
DL MU-MIMO as the beamformer needs to acquire explicit
channel state information in order to derive a steering matrix
that could be used to optimize the reception at one or more
beamformees.
The DL MU-MIMO transmissions can be organized in the
form of MU-TXOP to facilitate the sharing of TXOP where