| Abstract |
While there has been extensive theoretical work on sophisticated joint resource allocation algorithms for wireless networks, these ideas are not typically followed up in WiFi (IEEE 802.11) based deployments. The reasons range from technical issues such as limitations of current driver implementations to administrative issues such as not having centralized control over neighboring deployments. To this end, in this work, we investigate the feasibility of and benefits from resource control in a real WiFi system. Specifically, we focus on rate and power control capabilities and realize an adaptive rate-power controller (Minstrel-Piano) by enabling a cross-layer communication interface between the IEEE 802.11 PHY and MAC layers. Our initial evaluation results show that Minstrel-Piano significantly decreases the transmit power per communication while maintaining the same link performance in different scenarios. This is expected to achieve better spatial reuse as using less transmission power decreases the overall interference in the network. |
