Adaptive Multirate Auto Rate Fallback Protocol for IEEE 802.11 WLANS

An adaptive multirate auto rate fallback (AMARF) protocol is proposed for IEEE 802.11 WLANs. The key idea is to assign each data rate a unique success threshold, which is a criterion to switch one rate to the next higher rate, and the success thresholds can be changed dynamically in an adaptive manner according to the running conditions, such as packet length and channel parameters. Moreover, the proposed protocol can be implemented without any change to the current IEEE 802.11 standards. Our in-depth simulation shows that AMARE yields significantly higher throughput than other existing schemes including auto rate fallback (ARF) scheme and its variants, in various running conditions