Link Adaptation for Cooperative Wireless LANs

In wireless local area networks (WLANs), link adaptation is a traditional scheme which needs consideration of cross-layer dependence. Most recent work of link adaptation focuses on the direct transmission model, while our interests lay on cooperative wireless networks. Cooperation can form many different relaying strategies including virtual multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission. Thus, a link adaptation approach for cooperation is required to improve the network performance. We investigate the effect of an off-line link adaptation scheme on direct transmission throughput, and explore a strategy for cooperative network to maximize the throughput with a packet error constraint. Numerical results illustrate the dependence of performance on various parameters.