Adaptive Optimization of Rate Adaptation Algorithms in Multi-Rate WLANs
Rate adaptation is one of the basic functionalities in todays 802.11 wireless LANs (WLANs). Although it is primarily designed to cope with the variability of wireless channels and achieve higher system spectral efficiency, its design needs careful consideration of cross-layer dependencies, in particular, link-layer collisions. Most practical rate adaptations focus on the time-varying characteristics of wireless channels, ignoring the impact of link-layer collisions. As a result, they may lose their effectiveness due to unnecessary rate downshift wrongly triggered by the collisions. Some recently proposed rate adaptations use RTS/CTS to suppress the collision effect by differentiating collisions from channel errors. The RTS/CTS handshake, however, incurs significant overhead and is rarely activated in infrastructure WLANs. In this paper, we introduce a new approach for optimizing the operation of rate adaptations by adjusting the rate- increasing and decreasing parameters based on link- layer measurement. To construct the algorithm, we study the impact of rate-increasing and decreasing thresholds on performance and show that dynamic adjustment of thresholds is an effective way to mitigate the collision effect in multi-user environments. Our method does not require additional probing overhead incurred by RTS/CTS exchanges and may be practically deployed without change in firmware. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution, comparing with existing approaches through extensive simulations.
Jaehyuk Choi Jongkeun Na Kihong Park Chong-kwon Kim
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea 151-744 Dept. of Computer Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, U. S. A
国际会议
The 15th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols(ICNP 2007)(第15届IEEE国际网络协议大会)
北京
英文
144-153
2007-10-16（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）