An Experience Driven Design for IEEE 802.11ac Rate Adaptation based on Reinforcement Learning

The IEEE 802.11ac supports gigabit speeds by extending 802.11n air-interface features and increases the number of rate options by more than two times. Enabling so many rate options can be a challenge to rate adaptation (RA) solutions. Particularly, they need to adapt rates to various fast-changing channels; they would suffer without scalability. In this work, we identify three limitations of current 802.11ac RAs on commodity network interface cards (NICs): no joint rate and bandwidth adaptation, lack of scalability, and no online learning capability. To address the limitations, we apply deep reinforcement learning (DRL) into designing a scalable, intelligent RA, designated as experience driven rate adaptation (EDRA). DRL enables the online learning capability of EDRA, which not only automatically identifies useful correlations between important factors and performance for the rate search, but also derives low-overhead avenues to approach highest-goodput (HG) rates by learning from experience. It can make EDRA scalable to timely locate HG rates among many rate options over time. We implement and evaluate EDRA using the Intel Wi-Fi driver and Google TensorFlow on Intel 802.11ac NICs. The evaluation result shows that EDRA can outperform the Intel and Linux default RAs by up to 821.4% and 242.8%, respectively, in various cases.