Effects of rate control, bridging and antenna orientation on IEEE 802.11n link performance: An experimental analysis

In this paper we present a set of network experiments on IEEE 802.11n link constructed with open source software and commercially available hardware. Most existing works focus on optimizing MAC layer parameters in order to improve the link performance. In this paper, we investigate several “non-MAC” performance impacting factors, which are usually overlooked by the research community. The experiments were carried out in an indoor office environment over a relatively clean 5GHz band. Our experiments reveal that factors such as (i) rate control mechanism, (ii) bridging and (iii) antenna orientation can significantly impact the link performance.