Power and rate adaptation in IEEE 802.11a wireless LANs

We present a simple but powerful dynamic link adaptation mechanism for wireless LANs that is compliant with the IEEE 802.11a standard. Using this method, a transmitter is able to estimate the current link quality and, based on this information, to adapt the transmission parameters, namely the transmission data rate or the transmission power level, dynamically. To determine the link quality, the transmitter employs only information that is available locally. Therefore, the proposed method can be implemented without changes or enhancements to the current IEEE 802.11 standard. The efficiency of our method is investigated and evaluated by means of simulations.