Evaluations of MadWifi MAC layer rate control mechanisms

The 802.11 standards specify several transmission rates that can be used at the MAC layer protocol to adapt the transmission rate to channel conditions. Such dynamic adaptations can improve per-hop performance in Wireless Networks and therefore can have impact on the Quality of Service provided for communicating applications. In this paper we present a comprehensive evaluation of the performance of four rate control mechanisms used by the MadWifi driver in Linux: Onoe, AMRR, SampleRate and minstrel. The evaluation of these four rate control mechanisms was carried out in our platform for controllable and repeatable experiments.