Rate adaptation based on collision probability for IEEE 802.11 WLANs

Abstract

Nowadays IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs) support multiple transmission rates. To achieve the best performance, transmitting stations adopt the various forms of automatic rate fall-back (ARF). However, ARF suffers from severe performance degradation as the number of transmitting stations increases. In this paper, we propose a new rate adaptation scheme which adjusts the ARF's up/down threshold according to the channel contention level. Simulation result shows that the proposed scheme achieves fairly good performance compared with the existing schemes.