Goodput enhancement of IEEE 802.11a wireless LAN via link adaptation

IEEE 802.11a is a new high-speed physical layer (PHY) defined for the 5 GHz U-NII bands as a supplement to the existing IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN (WLAN) standard. In this paper, we give an overview of the IEEE 802.11a Orthogonal Frequency Domain Multiplexing (OFDM) PHY with eight different PHY rates as well as the distributed coordination function (DCF) of the IEEE 802.11 MAC, then derive the goodput performance analytically for peer-to-peer communication under the DCF. Based on the numerical results, we claim that link adaptation, which performs both dynamic fragmentation and PHY rate selection depending on the wireless channel condition between the transmitter and receiver, is an attractive way to improve the goodput performance of an IEEE 802.11a wireless LAN. Finally, we propose a system architecture to perform link adaptation.