I'm talking about the MAC layer here (at least I think I am). For example: is CSMA used? Are there ACKs? What is the re-transmit/timeout policy? What is the packet queuing policy? Does MT use frame aggregation these days? If not why not? Where are the stats that might help you diagnose link problems (re-try counts, frame error rates, collision back-off events, etc)?

I've been messing with outdoor 802.11-derived products for more than 10 years now and to be honest have never been able to get a complete accurate picture of what these things are doing and how they work. This is now proving to be a significant impediment to understanding why performance is all over the place on a new P2P link I'm testing. Flying blind.

Anyone have any good pointers on this? I've tried to approach it by reading the 802.11 standards documents but they're not exactly easy to read; define everything recursively (so and so is like it was in 802.11n with this little tweak for 802.11ac, etc); and I have no idea if MT is doing the same thing as 802.11 anyway when NV2 or NStreme is used.

I have read the Wiki pages. They provide tantalizing glimpses of what proper documentation might look like but fall short of the level of coverage I'm looking for. They're also mostly not updated since 802.11n days.