Exploiting medium access diversity in rate adaptive wireless LANs

Recent years have seen the growing popularity of multi-rate wireless network devices (e.g., 802.11a cards) that can exploit variations in channel conditions and improve overall network throughput. Concurrently, rate adaptation schemes have been developed that selectively increase data transmissions on a link when it offers good channel quality. In this paper, we propose a Medium Access Diversity (MAD) scheme that leverages the benefits of rate adaptation schemes by aggressively exploiting multiuser diversity. The basic mechanism of MAD is to obtain instantaneous channel condition information from multiple receivers and selectively transmit data to a receiver that improves the overall throughput of the network, while maintaining temporal fairness among multiple data flows. We identify and address the challenges in the design and implementation of MAD’s three phases: channel probing, data transmission, and receiver scheduling. We also use analytical models to examine the tradeoff ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: MOBICOM
• Authors: Zhengrong Ji, Yi Yang, Junlan Zhou, Mineo Takai, Rajive Bagrodia
• Keywords: Channel Condition, MOBICOM 2004, Overall Throughput, Rate Adaptation Scheme