Strider: automatic rate adaptation and collision handling

Abstract

This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of Strider, a system that automatically achieves almost the optimal rate adaptation without incurring any overhead. The key component in Strider is a novel code that has two important properties: it is rateless and collision-resilient. First, in time-varying wireless channels, Strider's rateless code allows a sender to effectively achieve almost the optimal bitrate, without knowing how the channel state varies. Second, Strider's collision-resilient code allows a receiver to decode both packets from collisions, and achieves the same throughput as the collision-free scheduler. We show via theoretical analysis that Strider achieves Shannon capacity for Gaussian channels, and our empirical evaluation shows that Strider outperforms SoftRate, a state of the art rate adaptation technique by 70% in mobile scenarios and by upto 2.8× in contention scenarios.