TurboCell SuperPacket Aggregation

For performance-critical outdoor Point-to-Multipoint environments supporting several interconnected LAN's, optimal bandwidth usage is crucial. The TurboCell protocols remedy problems associated with a long preamble by aggregating many small packets together into a single SuperPacket for transmission over the wireless link. In combination with the highly optimized adaptive polling technique employed by the TurboCell Base Station, actual throughput performance of your 802.11 network (or networks using other radios) is much closer to optimal performance.

Most wireless protocols, such as the IEEE 802.11 standard for wireless LAN's, were designed to extend wired Ethernet practices to a wireless Local Area Network. Because they were designed for local area networks, these network protocols function much like wired Ethernet. If a station has a packet to send, it listens to see if another station is busy transmitting, and transmits its packet. This assumes, of course, that the transmitting station is able to hear other stations on the network.

While this model works well in a local area network, the 802.11 standard and others like it do not make optimal use of wireless bandwidth. For example, due to interoperability requirements the radio preamble sent at the beginning of every 802.11 packet is sent at the lowest radio speed. For small packets, this preamble makes up a large percentage of the transmission time. As many small packets are sent, utilization drops to a fraction of what would be available if larger chunks of data were being transmitted.

Studies have shown that more than half of all packets sent on the Internet are less than 100 bytes in size. This results in a marked performance hit in wireless networks using most radio protocols. TurboCell solves this problem by aggregating packets together into the TurboCell SuperPacket, reducing the overall time needed to transmit several packets. Combined with TurboCell's Adaptive Dynamic Polling, the TurboCell SuperPacket helps to greatly increase wireless link utilization to close to optimum speeds!