acknowledgment frame

[mina]

hi i have a question:
we know when a sender transmits a data frame , the receiver sends one acknowledgment frame, now could you please tell me if it is the same for management frames as well? i mean after transmission management frames by sender does the receiver send a acknowledgment frame ?
thanks a lot

[golfnut]

Control (RTS/CTS) and data frames require ACK's.

Management frames have response frames instead of ACK's like probe request/probe response, association request/association response, etc.

For example, when a client devices scans for available networks, it sends a probe request frame. All AP's within ear shot of the request, respond with a probe response frame that includes items like supported data rates, SSID, etc.

If these frames required ACK's the overhead would make the network really slow...

Greg

[golfnut]

One more thing....

If you want to expirement to see the affect on network performance, I believe there's a beta version of DD-WRT with a feature that disables ACK frames altogether. I'd recommend doing this in a test environment otherwise you increase the chances of collisions when multiple devices are communicating with the AP.


Greg

[umdivx]

yup DD-WRT V24 SP2 you can disable ACK and timings and all that. Playing around with it as I type this.

- Josh