Adaptive Rate Control and Frame Length Adjustment for IEEE 802.11n Wireless Networks

In order to improve the utilization of the fading channel of the high-rate IEEE 802.11n wireless networks, an adaptive rate control and frame length adjustment scheme (i.e., ARCLA) is proposed in this paper. In ARCLA, the subframe error rate (SFER) of the aggregate MAC protocol data unit (A-MPDU) is used for the estimation of the link quality, and the channel air time is fairly allocated over the data transmissions based on the channel coherent time to ensure the uniformity of the link quality during one frame transmission. According to that, the data rate and the data frame length are adaptively adjusted in two-dimensions to fit the fluctuant channel condition. Furthermore, an analytical framework based on the semi-Markov process is formulated to evaluate the performance of our scheme. Simulations results verify the theoretical analysis and show the superiority of ARCLA in respect to throughput performance.