A link adaptation approach to multimedia data transmission in wireless home networks

Due to the unexpected characteristics of wireless links, retransmissions are frequently occurred. The abandon retransmissions degrade the quality of multimedia data by transmission errors caused by fading, noise and interference, shadowing, path loss and so on. In this paper, we propose a link adaptation approach to improve AV (audio/video) quality in a medium access control (MAC) layer. The approach provides a method to control packet sizes and rates for reducing transmission errors. We have developed a MAC protocol that consists of software modules in a kernel and hardware logics in a network interface card. Experimental results show the performance of our product.