FIT: On-the-fly, in-situ training with sensor data for SNR-based rate selection

Existing rate adaptation protocols have advocated training to establish the relationship between channel conditions and the optimal modulation and coding scheme. However, wireless devices for outdoor and vehicular communications frequently enter environments they have not yet encountered and therefore, have insufficient training for rate adaptation decisions. In addition, protocols are often optimally tuned for indoor environments but, when taken outdoors, perform poorly. In both cases, the decision structure formed offline lacks the ability to acclimate to a new situation on the fly. The diverse and ever-changing environments of increasingly mobile wireless devices call for a rate adaption scheme that can quickly adjust accordingly to form a unique environment set established by the user. In this paper, we propose an on-the-fly, in-situ training (FIT) mechanism which addresses the challenges of making rate decisions with unpredictable fluctuation and lack of repeatability of real wireless channels. We design and conduct extensive experiments on emulated and in-field wireless channels to evaluate the in-situ training process, showing that the rate decision structure can be updated as channel conditions change using existing traffic flows.