RARA: Rate Adaptation Using Rate-adaptive Acknowledgment for IEEE 802.11 WLANs

Abstract — The IEEE 802.11 standards support multiple bit rates at the physical layer so that stations can maximize the system performance by controlling the transmission rate re-sponding to the conditions of underlying time-varying channels. This paper proposes a novel scheme, termed as Rate Adaptation using Rate-adaptive Acknowledgment (RARA). The key idea of RARA is to regulate the ACK transmission rate as a means to dictate the sender to adjust the data transmission rate. Compared with previous works, the proposed scheme can react quickly to the prevailing conditions by the receiver-based decision while inducing marginal overhead. Simulation results show that the RARA consistently outperforms other rate adaption schemes. I