A Rate-Adaptive MAC Protocol for Wireless Networks
Gavin Holland, Nitin H. Vaidya, Paramvir Bahl · 2000
Wireless local-area networks are becoming increasingly popular. This is due, in part, to the recent availability of devices capable of communicating at data rates approaching that of conventional wired networks. These high rates are made possible through new modulation and coding techniques that dramatically increase bandwidth efficiency. However, maintaining reliable communication at higher data rates requires more signal power. Consequently, wireless devices often support multiple data rates, providing the user the ability to choose the rate that best suits their application. Alternatively, an automatic rate adaption mechanism may be used. Rate adaption is the process of automatically selecting the rate that gives the optimum throughput for the channel conditions. Although rate adaption mechanisms for cellular wireless networks have been studied at length, few have been proposed for wireless local-area networks. This paper presents one such mechanism: a rate adaptive MAC protocol based...