An Efficient Rate-Adaptive MAC for IEEE 802.11

Data rate selection for IEEE 802.11-based wireless networks is not specified in the Specification. The problem of determining an appropriate data rate for the sender to send DATA frames and to adapt to changing channel conditions is referred to as rate adaptation. We propose DRA (differential rate adaptation), a rate adaptation scheme for IEEE 802.11 networks. It enables a high network throughput by adaptively tuning the data transmission rate according to the channel conditions. It is responsive to link quality changes and has little implementation overhead. Our experiments indicate that DRA yields a throughput improvement of about 20% to 25% compared to previous work.