Congestion-Aware Rate Adaptation in Wireless Networks: A Measurement-Driven Approach

Traditional rate adaptation solutions for IEEE 802.11 wireless networks perform poorly in congested networks. Measurement studies show that congestion in a wireless network leads to the use of lower transmission data rates and thus reduces overall network throughput and capacity. The lack of techniques to reliably identify and characterize congestion in wireless networks has prevented development of rate adaptation solutions that incorporate congestion information in their decision framework. To this end, the authors' main contributions in this paper are two-fold. First, they present a technique that identifies and measures congestion in an 802.11 network in real time. Second, they design Wireless cOngestion Optimized Fallback (WOOF), a measurement-driven rate adaptation scheme for 802.11 devices that uses the congestion measurement to identify congestion related packet losses.