LRRA: Location-Related Rate Adaptation Algorithm in IEEE 802.11p for DSRC Technology in VANET

Traffic management, road sensing and multimedia delivery in vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) are application domains whose performance depend on network throughput. Rate adaptation is the key method to maximize the throughput by estimating the current channel qualities and deciding the best bitrate for the next frames. In VANET, rate adaptation is more challenging due to the rapid variation of channel qualities caused by the high speed and density of vehicles. Fortunately, vehicles are subject to certain recurring patterns particularly when vehicles communicate with the road side units (RSU). In this paper, we design and implement a location-related rate adaptation algorithm (LRRA) which combines the historical information stored in database and current channel conditions to jointly maximize the throughput. We evaluate LRRA with outdoor experiments and ns-3 simulations. The results show that LRRA is superior to most current rate adaptation algorithms.