Dynamic Link Adaptation for High Throughput Wireless Access Networks

IEEE 802.11n and IEEE 802.11ac amendments of IEEE 802.11 standard are introduced to achieve high throughput in wireless local area networks (WLANs) with modifications in both Physical layer (PHY) and Medium Access Control (MAC) sublayer. Wireless channels are time-varying systems which are shared by multiple heterogeneous wireless stations. Every wireless station should be capable to tune dynamically its transmission rate by tuning the link properties, otherwise high transmission failures may lead to impose low system performance. In this paper, we propose a closed-loop, cross-layer and statistic-based link adaptation algorithm called High Throughput Wireless Link Adaptation (HiWiLA) for high throughput wireless networks (HT-WLANs) where the metric of link adaptation is computed by "Received Signal Strength Indicator" (RSSI) of channel and observed MAC throughput considering channel bonding, short guard interval (SGI), frame aggregation and different Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS) levels. We analyze the performance of the proposed scheme through simulation and a practical testbed, and show that HiWiLA achieves on average 10% - 70% better throughput than the existing state of the art schemes.