Correlation Based Rate Adaptation via Insights from Incomplete Observations in 802.11 Networks

Rate adaptation, as a challenging issue for wireless network design, has been an active research topic for years. Existing schemes either assume perfect channel information, or conduct rate adaptation in a black box way, hence can not achieve desirable performance. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme called correlation based rate adaptation (CORA) to address the rate adjustment problem. Unlike previous schemes, CORA splits rate into more atomic components and adjusts them according to the correlation between rate adaptation actions and transmission results. We use IEEE 802.11n as the context for CORA design, where transmission mode has been expanded to spatial dimension in addition to the usual modulation and convolution coding mechanisms. Performance evaluation shows that CORA can conduct rate adaptation in a more logical way and significantly outperform the comparison scheme.