A study of the system impact from different approaches to link adaptation in WLAN

Abstract: The IEEE 802.11 standards define several transmission rates that can be used at the physical layer to adapt the transmission rate to channel conditions. This dynamic adaptation attempts to improve the performance in Wireless LAN (WLAN) and hence can have impact on the Quality of Service (QoS) perceived by the users. In this work we present the design and implementation of several new link adaptation (LA) algorithms. The performance of the developed algorithms is tested and compared against some existing algorithms such as Minstrel as well as an ideal LA. The evaluation is carried out in a network system simulator that models all the pro- cedures needed for the exchange of data frames according to the 802.11 standards. Different scenarios are used to simulate various realistic conditions. In particular, the Clear Channel Assessment Threshold (CCAT) is modified in the scenarios and the impact of its modification is also assessed. The algorithms are tested under identical environments to ensure that the experiments are controllable and repeatable. For each algorithm the mean and 5th percentile throughput are measured under different traffic loads to evaluate and compare the performance of the different algorithms. The tradeoff between signaling overhead and performance is also evaluated. It was found that the proposed link adaptation schemes achieved higher mean through- put than the Minstrel algorithm. We also found that the performance of some of the proposed schemes is close to that of the ideal LA.