Hardware implementation of wireless bit rate adaptation

Abstract

This thesis presents a hardware implementation of the SoftRate bit-rate adaptation protocol. SoftRate is a new bit-rate adaptation protocol, which uses per-bit confidence hints generated by the convolutional decoder to estimate the channel bit-error rate. Implementing SoftRate requires changes to both the physical and media access control layers. which precludes using existing commodity 802.11 hardware. This project developed a SoftRate implementation on top of Airblue, an FPGA platform for developing wireless protocols. We present a hardware implementation of SoftRate which meets 802.11 timing requirements.