Towards MIMO-aware 802.11n rate adaptation

  • Authors:
  • Ioannis Pefkianakis;Suk-Bok Lee;Songwu Lu

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea;Department of Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA

  • Venue:
  • IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

In this paper, we use real experiments to study multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) 802.11n rate adaptation (RA) on a programmable access point (AP) platform. Our case study shows that existing RA solutions offer much lower throughput than even a fixed-rate scheme. It is proven that all such algorithms are MIMO-mode oblivious; they do not differentiate spatial diversity and spatial multiplexing modes. We first design MiRA, a novel MIMO RA scheme that zigzags between intra- and inter-MIMO modes to addressMIMO 802.11n dynamics. Second, we examine a window-based RA solution, which runs an independent RA in each MIMO mode in parallel and a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)-based MIMO RA that differentiates modes using SNR measurements. Our experiments show that MIMO-mode aware designs outperform MIMO-mode oblivious RAs in various settings, with goodput gains up to 73.5% in field trials.