Analysis and experimental evaluation of rate adaptation with transmit buffer information

Abstract

In hardware, packet loss may happen due to overflow at a finite-depth transmit buffer in addition to the packet corruption in the channel. To reduce such losses and further improve spectral efficiency via rate selection, we exploit either statistical or instantaneous knowledge of transmit buffer occupancy and source packet distribution in IEEE 802.11-based systems, which have highly variable frame durations. We consider a traditional method of rate adaptation based on channel quality information and evaluate the throughput gain in hardware when the buffer occupancy and source packet distribution information are known. Our optimization objective is to maximize the throughput with constant transmit power since most wireless standards (e.g., 802.11, Bluetooth, ZigBee) operate in this manner. We study both cases with and without probe packets during the transmission. By evaluating the effect of diverse buffer sizes with different packet arrival distributions, both our theoretical analysis and our experimental results show that the throughput can be improved as much as 35% when the source packet distribution and buffer status information are exploited.