Evaluation of the Minstrel rate adaptation algorithm in IEEE 802.11g WLANs

Rate adaptation varies the transmission rate of a wireless sender to match the wireless channel conditions, in order to achieve the best possible performance. It is a key component of IEEE 802.11 wireless networks. Minstrel is a popular rate adaptation algorithm due to its efficiency and availability in commonly used wireless drivers. However, despite its popularity, little work has been done on evaluating the performance of Minstrel or comparing it to the performance of fixed rates. In this paper, we conduct an experimental study that compares the performance of Minstrel against fixed rates in an IEEE 802.11g testbed. The experiment results show that whilst Minstrel performs reasonably well in static wireless channel conditions, in some cases the algorithm has difficulty selecting the optimal data rate in the presence of dynamic channel conditions. In addition, Minstrel performs well when the channel condition improves from bad quality to good quality. However, Minstrel has trouble selecting the optimal rate when the channel condition deteriorates from good quality to bad quality.