Summary In this paper, we analyze the impacts of different frame types on the self-similarity and burstiness characteristics of the aggregated frame traffic in a real 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN). We find that the impacts of different frame types are related to the mean frame sizes and the proportions of specified frame types in the aggregated frame traffic. Furthermore, we propose an analytical model to capture the relationship of self-similarity characteristics between the aggregated frame traffic and different frame types. These new results provide an insight of frame traffic characteristics and some practical guidelines for developing new efficient algorithms to improve the common medium utilization and system throughput performance. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.