Cross-layer wireless bit rate adaptation

By Mythili Vutukuru, Hari Balakrishnan, Kyle Jamieson. Conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication, 2009

385 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper presents SoftRate, a wireless bit rate adaptation protocol that is responsive to rapidly varying channel conditions. Unlike previous work that uses either frame receptions or signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) estimates to select bit rates, SoftRate uses confidence information calculated by the physical layer and exported to higher layers via the SoftPHY interface to estimate the prevailing channel bit error rate (BER). Senders use this BER estimate, calculated over each received packet (even when the packet has no bit errors), to pick good bit rates. SoftRate's novel BER computation works across different wireless environments and hardware without requiring any retraining. SoftRate also uses abrupt changes in the BER estimate to identify interference, enabling it to reduce the bit rate only in response to channel errors caused by attenuation or fading. Our experiments conducted using a software radio prototype show that SoftRate achieves 2X higher throughput than popular frame-level protocols such as SampleRate and RRAA. It also achieves 20% more throughput than an SNR-based protocol trained on the operating environment, and up to 4X higher throughput than an untrained SNR-based protocol. The throughput gains using SoftRate stem from its ability to react to channel variations within a single packet-time and its robustness to collision losses.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fe4e27f9e045fd316ae4f08883ab67ceb558dfb8

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Citations in the corpus

Predictable 802.11 packet delivery from wireless channel measurements (2010, methodology): “SoftRate [28] is an explicit feedback scheme that uses information gleaned during packet reception at a given rate to predict how well different rates will work.”
Efficient and reliable low-power backscatter networks (2012, background): “In contrast to traditional work on rate adaptation [47, 25], which adapts the rate of individual senders, this protocol adapts the aggregate rate of the backscatter nodes that want to transmit.”
Achieving single channel, full duplex wireless communication (2010, methodology): “Existing rate selection algorithms take two approaches, namely packet error rate based [3, 14], and signal to noise ratio based [19, 21].”