MIMO technology offers a wide range of transmission rates for modern wireless LANs. In order to improve the performance of the rate control module, statistical information on the history of state and usage of each transmission rate is maintained at the MAC layer to help More
MIMO technology offers a wide range of transmission rates for modern wireless LANs. In order to improve the performance of the rate control module, statistical information on the history of state and usage of each transmission rate is maintained at the MAC layer to help determine the rate at which future packets are sent. However, the great diversity of transmission rates in the 802.11n and 802.11ac standards imposes an overhead for updating this information. In this article, to reduce the state space of transmission rates while keeping statistics approximately up to date for each rate, a method for clustering rates is presented so that when sending a packet over a transmission rate, statistical information relating to all the rates belonging to the same cluster is updated. As a result, statistics for a greater number of rates can be updated even when sending a fewer number of packets. We implemented our proposed mechanism in the Linux kernel environment and evaluated its performance under different conditions on an experimental testbed deployed in our research laboratory. The results show that the proposed method outperforms the de-facto Minstrel-HT rate control mechanism in terms of throughput and number of successful transmissions.
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