Simulation and Performance Evaluation of the Intel Rate Adaptation Algorithm

With the rise of the complexity of the IEEE 802.11 standard, rate adaptation algorithms have to deal with a large set of values for all the different parameters which impact the network throughput. Simple trial-and-error algorithms can no longer explore solution space in reasonable time and smart solutions are required. Most of the WiFi controllers rely on proprietary code and the used rate adaptation algorithms in these controllers are unknown. Very few WiFi controllers provide their rate adaptation algorithms when they do not rely on the Minstrel-HT algorithm, which is implemented in the Linux kernel. Intel WiFi controllers come with their own rate adaptation algorithms that are implemented in the Intel IWLWIFI Linux Driver which is open-source. In this paper, we have reverse-engineered the Intel rate adaptation mechanism from the source code of the IWLWIFI Linux driver, and we give, in a comprehensive form, the underlying rate adaptation algorithm named IWL-MVM-RS. We describe the different mechanisms used to seek the best throughput adapted to the network conditions. We have also implemented the IWL-MVM-RS algorithm in the ns-3 simulator. Thanks to this implementation, we can evaluate the performance of IWL-MVM-RS in different scenarios (static and with mobility, with and without fast fading). We also compare the performances of IWL-MVM-RS with the ones of Minstrel-HT and IDEALWIFI, also implemented in the ns-3 simulator.