IEEE Wireless LAN Capacity in Multicell Environments with Rate Adaptation

Since the advent of the first IEEE 802.11 standard, many research efforts have been spent on evaluating different aspects of the specification. In this paper, we present a new method to predict the capacity of a multicell IEEE 802.11 network. The mechanism takes the effect of co-channel and adjacent channel interference into account. In addition, the study of a common rate adaptation algorithm is included. When the effect of rate adaptation is considered within the throughput computation, the results provided by our algorithm are closer to the measurements obtained in a real scenario. To the best of our knowledge, this paper presents the first analytical study of throughput performance including both types of interferences and the effect of bit rate adaptation.