## 5 Performance Evaluation
### Simulation Environment  
To study the performance of the proposed FASBA and to compare it with MP-EDCA [10], Riverbed Modeler version 18.0 [9] is used. The Riverbed simulation tool was chosen due to its popularity and credibility [40]. For the system performance study, we created about 30 simulation scenarios (15 for FASBA and another 15 for MP-EDCA).  
Table 4 shows the MAC parameters used in the simulations. To implement the frame catenation shown in Figure 4, a new data frame is developed with the reserve type field of 11 and a subtype value of 1000 of the frame control field of the MAC frame structure.  
We implemented a simple two-bit BlockAck request and response frames in the Riverbed Modeler simulator by customising the 802.11 EDCA frames. The implementation involves creating new nodes for network communication and the corresponding process models in the system. The 802.11 WLAN MAC packet formats are categorised into three types i.e., (1) management, (2) control, and (3) data packets. For implementing FASBA in Riverbed Modeler, the type of MAC data (Figure 4) and BlockAck of control packets (Figure 5) were modified. The type bits of the WLAN data packet are used for identifying the packet sequence. And only 4 bits out of 32 bits of the BlockAck field of control packs were used for sending the acknowledgement.  
Moreover, EDCA's MAC model was also customised to implement the BlockAck request and BlockAck frames. The activation of FASBA is through the same activation process used in the EDCA, that is, adding a block acknowledgement (ADDBA) frame. In this work, we only considered video traffic and the UDP transmission protocol.  
The FASBA's frame aggregation with a block-acknowledge maintains backward compatibility with the existing Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) and EDCA protocols. The general parameters such as area, mobility and channel condition are presented in Table 5. Additionally, while Figure 2 illustrates both protected and non-protected mechanisms, we only simulated the protected mechanism. This is because protection aims to safeguard against bulk data loss caused by channel errors or multi-user contention in the same traffic class.  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l l l l} \hline \hline  & Data rate = 65 Mbps (base)/600 Mbps (max) & \\ \multirow{3}{*}{**General** **Parameters**} & Protocol = IEEE 802.11n & \\  & Number of MP-EDCA nodes: 4–60 & \\  & Number of FASBA nodes: 4–60 & \\  & Application: data (text message of 150 characters) & \\  & TXOP limit = 0 ms & \\ \hline \hline \multicolumn{3}{c}{**MP-EDCA and FASBA**} \\ \multirow{3}{*}{\begin{tabular}{l} **Contention** \\ **Parameters** \\ \end{tabular} } & Risk to Life (RtoL) & \begin{tabular}{l} Risk to Health \\ (RtoH) \\ Priority Nodes \\ \end{tabular} & \begin{tabular}{l} Risk to Property \\ (RtoP) \\ Priority Nodes \\ \end{tabular} & \begin{tabular}{l} Risk to Environment \\ (RtoE) \\ Priority Nodes \\ \end{tabular} \\ \cline{2-4}  & \begin{tabular}{l} RtoL SIFS = 10 \\ \end{tabular} & \begin{tabular}{l} RtoH SIFS = 25 \\ RtoL Slot Time = 25 \\ \end{tabular} & \
\begin{tabular}{l} RtoP SIFS = 40 \\ RtoL Slot Time = 40 \\ \end{tabular} &
\begin{tabular}{l} RtoL SlFS = 55 \\ RtoL Slot Time = 70 \\ \end{tabular} \\  & AIFS [0] = 1 slot & AIFS [0] = 1 slot & AIFS [0] = 1 slot \\  & WMin [0] = 2 slots & WMin [0] = 2 slots & WMin [0] = 2 slots \\  & WMax [8] = 8 slots & WMax [8] = 8 slots & WMax [8] = 8 slots \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 4: MAC parameters used in simulation.