IEEE 802.11ac Link Adaptation Under Mobility
Raja Karmakar, Samiran Chattopadhyay, Sandip Chakraborty · 2017
High fluctuation of signal strength is evident in wireless channel under mobile environment. IEEE 802.11n and IEEE 802.11ac based wireless technologies experience a challenge for selecting link configuration parameters, like number of spatial streams, channel bonding, advanced modulation and coding schemes, frame aggregation etc., dynamically under mobility. Selection of the best possible data rate by tuning link parameters is a challenging issue due to the channel asymmetry in mobile environment. In this paper, we propose an adaptive learning mechanism, HT-MobiRate, for high throughput dynamic link adaptation under mobile scenario. HT-MobiRate is based on Thompson sampling and inspired from multi-armed bandit approach. To the best of our knowledge, this invention is first in the direction of link adaptation for IEEE 802.11ac under mobile environment. We analyze the performance of HT-MobiRate with a practical high throughput wireless testbed built over 6 IEEE 802.11ac supported access points and 20 IEEE 802.11ac clients (both client boards as well as smart-phones). We recognize that it performs considerably better than other competing schemes proposed in the literature for link adaptation in static environment.