Energy-efficient rate adaptation for outdoor long distance WiFi links

WiLD (WiFi-based Long Distance) mesh networks have been broadly deployed for bringing extremely low-cost IT revolution to developing regions. However, external WiFi/non-WiFi interferences severely aggravate network performance. Besides, over-provisioning transmission power without considering the channel dynamics and interferences can result in unnecessary energy consumption, which will eventually lead to the network outage. In this paper, an energy efficient rate adaptation algorithm is proposed for WiLD links. It adopts an online measurement of FDR (Frame Delivery Ratio)-RSSI mapping to choose bit rate based on the joint considerations of RSSI and transmission power. Moreover, a novel algorithm called CNP-CUSUM (Continuous Non-Parameter-Cumulative Sum) is presented to detect changes of external interference intensity at receivers by leveraging beacon loss ratio statistics. Our simulation results show that it significantly outperforms fixed bit-rate, fixed transmission power schemes by achieving higher energy efficiency and considerable link throughput gain.

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