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Hybrid rate control for IEEE 802.11

Published: 01 October 2004 Publication History

Abstract

Streaming multimedia content in real-time over a wireless link is a challenging task because of the rapid fluctuations in link conditions that can occur due to movement, interference, and so on. The popular IEEE 802.11 standard includes low-level tuning parameters like the transmission rate. Standard device drivers for today's wireless products are based on gathering statistics, and consequently, adapt rather slowly to changes in conditions. To meet the strict latency requirements of streaming applications, we designed and implemented an advanced control algorithm that uses signal-strength (SNR) information to achieve fast responses. Since SNR readings are quite noisy we do not use that information to directly control the rate setting, but rather as a safeguard limiting the range of feasible settings to choose from. We report on real-time experiments involving two laptops equipped with IEEE 802.11a wireless interface cards. The results show that using SNR information greatly enhances responsiveness in comparison to statistics-based rate controllers.

References

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B.E. Braswell and J.C. McEachen. Modeling Data Rate Agility in the IEEE 802.11a WLAN Protocol. In OPNETWORK 2001, March 2001.
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Javier del Prado Pavon and Sunghyun Choi. Link adaptation strategy for IEEE 802.11 WLAN via received signal strength measurement. In IEEE International Conference on Communications, 2003 (ICC '03), volume 2, pages 1108--1113, Anchorage, Alaska, USA, May 2003.
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I. Haratcherev, K. Langendoen, I. Lagendijk, and H. Sips. Application-Directed Automatic 802.11 Rate Control: Design Rationale and Preliminary Results. In ASCI 2003, pages 56--60, Heijen, The Netherlands, June 2003.
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      cover image ACM Conferences
      MobiWac '04: Proceedings of the second international workshop on Mobility management & wireless access protocols
      October 2004
      140 pages
      ISBN:1581139209
      DOI:10.1145/1023783
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 01 October 2004

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      Author Tags

      1. MAC layer
      2. SNR
      3. link adaptation
      4. rate control

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      View all
      • (2024)WideRate: Reinforcement Learning Rate Adaptation for Mobile Wide Area Networks2024 IEEE 99th Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC2024-Spring)10.1109/VTC2024-Spring62846.2024.10683543(1-6)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2024
      • (2024)Bidirectional Bandwidth Coordination Under Half-Duplex Bottlenecks for Video Streaming2024 IEEE 32nd International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP)10.1109/ICNP61940.2024.10858534(1-12)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2024
      • (2024)A Wireless Security Threat Arising from the Contamination of Transmission Pulse ShapeICC 2024 - IEEE International Conference on Communications10.1109/ICC51166.2024.10622168(85-90)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2024
      • (2022)Rate Adaptation: A Practical Algorithm for Heterogeneous Wi-Fi Networks2022 IEEE Ninth International Conference on Communications and Electronics (ICCE)10.1109/ICCE55644.2022.9852082(61-66)Online publication date: 27-Jul-2022
      • (2021)Implementation of a Fast Link Rate Adaptation Algorithm for WLAN SystemsElectronics10.3390/electronics1001009110:1(91)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2021
      • (2020)Greedy Hybrid Rate Adaptation in Dynamic Wireless Communication EnvironmentICASSP 2020 - 2020 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)10.1109/ICASSP40776.2020.9053007(1718-1722)Online publication date: May-2020
      • (2020)MAC-layer rate control for 802.11 networks: a surveyWireless Networks10.1007/s11276-020-02295-2Online publication date: 14-Mar-2020
      • (2019)Optimal Rate Sampling in 802.11 Systems: Theory, Design, and ImplementationIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2018.285475818:5(1145-1158)Online publication date: 1-May-2019
      • (2019)Real-Time and Reliable Industrial Control Over Wireless LANs: Algorithms, Protocols, and Future DirectionsProceedings of the IEEE10.1109/JPROC.2019.2913450107:6(1027-1052)Online publication date: Jun-2019
      • (2019)Real-Time Optical Wireless Mobile Communication with High Physical Layer ReliabilityJournal of Lightwave Technology10.1109/JLT.2019.2893520(1-1)Online publication date: 2019
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