Rate Adaptation Based on Loss in WLAN for Smart City Applications

Abstract The evolution of networking technologies has enabled us to connect devices, people, things, and infrastructures. This has promoted urban development by enabling technologies for building smart cities. The scope for developing more featured applications has got a boom in the IT industries. Enabling technologies like Wi-Fi had an integral role in smart cities with their advanced features and low cost of implementation. To cope with the user requirements and technological changes IEEE 802.11 standard for Wi-Fi timely introduces new amendments. The increasing complexity of the latest amendments with a wide range of rates leads rate selection to a difficult task. The IEEE 802.11 standards did not specify any methods for rate selection. Researchers have come up with different rate selection algorithms to resolve this problem. However, the complex nature, huge time consumption, and real time implementation difficulties make it less effective. This paper proposes a rate adaptation algorithm based on smart usage of block-acknowledgment and signal strength. Simulation result from NS3 shows that the proposed rate adaptation method improves the performance, based on packet delivery ratio, delay, and throughput compared with the recent RaCA algorithm.