On the rate adaptation for IEEE 802.11 wireless networks

Rate adaptation (RA) is a mechanism to choose transmission rate based on the dynamic channel quality in wireless networks. This paper studied the adaptation algorithm run solely at the sender-side in IEEE 802.11 networks. The key insight is the inference discrepancy in inferring the relative order of transmission rates with respect to the expected performance, which indicates that one cannot always reach the correct order based solely on the channel state information collected by the sender itself. The consequence is wrong rate decision and significant performance loss. Therefore, we present a new RA structure to mitigate such effect by using a novel component, rate testing. Further, by employing the active measurement, a lightweight and effective testing mechanism, SFB, short frame burst, is proposed to detect and filter out the unsuitable transmission rate. Finally, an active measurement-based rate adaptation mechanism (AMRA) is designed and implemented. The experimental results show that AMRA outperforms many other well-known RA solutions in most scenarios.