The 802.11g 11 Mb/s Rate is More Robust than 6 Mb/s

Author

Huang, K.D. ; Malone, D. ; Duffy, K.R.

Author_Institution

Hamilton Inst., NUI Maynooth, Maynooth, Ireland

Volume

10

Issue

4

fYear

2011

fDate

4/1/2011 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

1015

Lastpage

1020

Abstract

The robustness to noise of the 802.11b/g 5.5 Mb/s and 11 Mb/s rates must be investigated experimentally as they cannot be predicted theoretically. In this paper we report on detailed outdoor and indoor measurements that lead us to the surprising conclusion that the 11 Mb/s 802.11g rate experiences fewer packet losses than the 6 Mb/s 802.11g rate at any given (symbol) SNR. This occurs due to the combination of modulation and physical layer coding schemes used by these rates and has serious implications for rate control algorithms. The practical implications of this, factoring in the interaction between packet loss and 802.11 MAC retries, is that 6 Mb/s is effectively redundant as a packet transmission rate if the 11 Mb/s rate is available.

Keywords

access protocols; modulation coding; wireless LAN; 802.11 MAC; 802.11g; bit rate 11 Mbit/s; bit rate 5.5 Mbit/s; indoor measurements; modulation coding; outdoor measurements; packet loss; packet transmission; physical layer coding; IEEE 802.11g Standard; Payloads; Robustness; Signal to noise ratio; Throughput; IEEE 802.11; WLAN; packet loss rate;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Wireless Communications, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1536-1276

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/TWC.2011.030311.100402

Filename

5725212