CARA: Collision-Aware Rate Adaptation for IEEE 802.11 WLANs

— Today’s IEEE 802.11 WLANs (Wireless LANs) provide multiple transmission rates so that different rates can be exploited in an adaptive manner depending on the underlying channel condition in order to maximize the system performance. Many rate adaptation schemes have been proposed so far while most (if not all) of the commercial devices implement a simple open-loop rate adaptation scheme (i.e., without feedback from the receiver), called ARF (Automatic Rate Fallback) due to its simplicity. A key problem with such open-loop rate adaptation schemes is that they do not consider the collision effect, and hence, malfunction severely when many transmission failures are due to collisions. In this paper, we propose a novel rate-adaptation scheme, called CARA (Collision-Aware Rate Adaptation). The key idea of CARA is that the transmitter station combines adaptively the Request-to-Send/Clear-to-Send (RTS/CTS) exchange with the Clear Channel Assessment (CCA) functionality to differentiate fra...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Jongseok Kim, Seongkwan Kim, Sunghyun Choi, Daji Qiao
• Keywords: Communications, INFOCOM 2006, Open-loop Rate Adaptation, Rate Adaptation, Rate Adaptation Schemes