Cognitive modulation and coding scheme adaptation for 802.11n and 802.11af networks

In the recent years, wireless communication experienced a huge growth, and nowadays many services are built on top of it. Much of the user demands comes from indoor environments, in which obstructions like walls and floors decrease the received signal to levels not suitable for reliable and high speed communication. Recently, national regulators worldwide started to investigate the usage of TV bands, thanks to the switch from analog to digital TV. These regulations gave birth to different wireless standards to make use of this new opportunistic spectrum. In this paper, we show how different 802.11 standard behave in indoor environment. Namely, we analyze IEEE 802.11n networks in the 2.4 GHz band, and IEEE 802.11af in the TV band, by means of theoretical analisys and simulations. Then, we design an algorithm that leverages the use of the different IEEE 802.11 amendments, by monitoring the achievable data rates with respect to the packet-error-rate, and provide simulation results on its performance on different modeled scenarios.