On the use of rate and power adaptation in V-BLAST systems for data protocol performance improvement

In this paper we address the issue of optimizing the performance of data-link and transport protocols running on a system including multiple transmit and receive antennas with a V-BLAST architecture. More specifically, we explore the possibility of adaptively selecting which transmit antennas and which per antenna rates to use as well as the antenna transmit powers in order to maximize the rate of data packets successfully delivered through the system. This is a novel approach with respect to the recent literature which is generally focused on channel capacity optimization. We show that the use of this rate/power adaptation technique, when a data transmission protocol is running over the link, may lead to significant throughput improvements especially at small signal-to-noise ratios.