Design and experimentation of rate adaptation for IEEE 802.11n WLANs

Abstract

Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) have become increasingly popular due to the recent availability of affordable devices providing multiple and high rate capabilities. Optimizing the performance of WLANs for emerging new internet applications that demand High Throughput (HT) is an important and a highly challenging issue. In this paper, we present a novel practical Rate Adaptation (RA) algorithm, termed L3S, which extends legacy schemes with new MIMO features suitable for the forthcoming 802.11n high-speed MIMO-based WLAN products. We implemented our rate adaptation algorithm in real hardware devices and evaluated its performance and compared it to the existing rate control mechanisms. Our experiments will demonstrate that our scheme allows the current 802.11n devices to have a greater adaptability to a variety of wireless channel conditions, and performs better than state-of-the-art rate adaptation algorithms. © 2011 IEEE.