Rate-adaptation for multi-rate IEEE 802.11 WLANs using mutual feedback between transmitter and receiver

The IEEE 802.11 standard conformant wireless communication stations have multi-rate transmission capability. To achieve greater communication efficiency, multi-rate capable stations use rate-adaptation to select appropriate transmission rate according to variations in the channel quality. This paper proposes a novel rate-adaptation scheme where the decision of rate selection relies on the mutual feedback of a transmitter and receiver pair. As an important feature of a rate-adaptation scheme, our proposed solution is highly responsive when compared with existing rate-adaptation scheme. Using the mutual-feedback, it has been made possible to achieve frame-loss differentiation with just three frames, avoiding the use of RTS/CTS and further delays in this process. Unlike the previous approaches, the feedback is delivered to the transmitter without any changes to the standard frame format. Various performance tests assert the suitability of our proposed solution in different test scenarios over existing rate-adaptation schemes.