Link adaptation strategy for IEEE 802.11 WLAN via received signal strength measurement

IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) physical layers (PHYs) support multiple transmission rates. The PHY rate to be used for a particular frame transmission is solely determined by the transmitting station. The transmission rate should be chosen in an adaptive manner since the wireless channel condition varies over time due to such factors as station mobility, time-varying interference, and location-dependent errors. In this paper, we present a novel link adaptation algorithm, which aims to improve the system throughput by adapting the transmission rate to the current link condition. Our algorithm is simply based on the received signal strength measured from the received frames, and hence it does not require any change in the current IEEE 802.11 WLAN Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol. Based on the simulation and its comparison with a numerical analysis, it is shown that the proposed algorithm closely approximates the ideal case with the perfect knowledge about the channel and receiver conditions.