IEEE 802.11 rate adaptation: a practical approach
MSWiM '04 Proceedings of the 7th ACM international symposium on Modeling, analysis and simulation of wireless and mobile systems
Robust rate adaptation for 802.11 wireless networks
Proceedings of the 12th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking
Efficient channel-aware rate adaptation in dynamic environments
Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services
Proceedings of the 14th ACM international conference on Mobile computing and networking
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Rate adaptation algorithms are critical to improving the throughput performance of WLANs. While previous studies have examined the performance of different algorithms in some detail using numerous measurements and simulations, there is a lack of a theory that would allow comparison across different channel conditions. This paper is a first step towards developing an abstract model that can allow us to (a) estimate or predict the performance of different algorithms and (b) allow us to make general statements about which algorithms would perform better, under what channel conditions. Our work is empirical in nature and uses three rate algorithms available in the Madwifi driver to examine the problem. We identify two key metrics, the speed of adaptation and the quality of adaptation, that taken together nicely encapsulate an algorithm's performance. We then show how these metrics predict the throughput behavior of the three rate algorithms considered with an accuracy of over 70%. Furthermore, we show that these metrics can be used to make very general statements comparing the behavior of any pair of algorithms over a wide range of channels.