Performance evaluation of rate adaptation algorithms for seamless heterogeneous vehicular communications

VANET is an emerging area of wireless ad-hoc networks to contribute in the success of connected vehicles projects. The extremely changeable number of mobile nodes and high mobility are challenging issues. Furthermore, this particular network has several problems in term of defining suitable schemes and protocols like rate adaptation mechanisms. The overall performance of diverse applications in VANET such as traffic control and multimedia delivery is based on the achievement ratio these networks can offer and the network throughput. Rate adaptation is an essential technique to evade the performance network degradation and to maximize the throughput by using the estimation of the present channel characteristics and determining the optimal bitrate for subsequent transmissions. Despite there are several available rate control algorithms for 802.11 WLANs standards, there are few works devoted to the rate adaptation for the standard of vehicular networks. In this paper, we compare and evaluate the existing data rate adaptation schemes in numerous vehicular environments to recognize their behavior and analyze their performance in diverse scenarios. Six algorithms were chosen for comparison using the NS-3 simulator: AARF, AARF-CD, AMRR, CARA, Onoe, and Minstrel. The simulation outcomes demonstrate that Minstrel algorithm outperforms the remaining five mechanisms in dense and dynamic situations.