Wireless rate adaptation via smart pilot

Rate adaptation is an essential component in today's wireless standards, for its ability to adaptively approach the channel capacity, and maximize the system throughput. The difficulty in rate adaptation stems from estimating the optimal data rate in a fluctuated channel. Previous wisdoms leverage PHY layer information for rate estimation, such as Soft PHY hints or Channel State Information. These information solely comes from one same layer, which are insufficient to track the optimal data rate. We observe that by investigating the information in both PHY layer decoder and upper layer protocol headers, more pilots can be exploited to estimate the optimal data rate across both time and frequency domain. These smart pilots help remove the residual channel effect and calibrate the CSI with minimum overhead. Based on the calibrated CSI, we propose a novel greedy rate selection algorithm to harness frequency diversity, which obtains the optimal data rate over all the subcarriers. Our experiments on GNU radio test bed show that Smart Pilot quickly tracks the link variance, and reduces the residual channel effect by 87%. Further, the trace driven simulation reveals that greedy rate selection algorithm predicts the data rate as good as the optimal rate adaptation algorithms for 802.11 standards.