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

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 the antenna transmit powers in order to maximize the number of data packets successfully delivered through the system. This is a novel approach with respect to the literature which is generally focused on channel capacity optimization. We show that the use of this power adaptation technique, when a TCP protocol is running over the link, leads to significant throughput improvements especially at small signal-to-noise ratios.