Devices are increasingly employing wireless communications techniques to provide high data rate user applications. Examples of such applications include (but are not limited to) video streaming in personal area network (PAN) mode and wireless display (WiDi) applications. Such applications can be very sensitive to packet loss. For instance, in the context of WiDi, a single packet loss can corrupt an image frame and introduce “banding” issues on the picture. Further, consecutive packet losses can cause more severe impact on the visual experience and produce a “freezing” effect.
Wireless communications devices are often confronted with interfering noise from various sources. In environments such as households, burst noise is common in the industrial scientific and medical (ISM) frequency band (2.4˜2.5 GHz). Such noise may be caused by microwave ovens, co-located radios, and other devices. Typically, the on/off switching of such noise is quick. As a result, the quality of a channel may quickly alternate between two states: a clear state and a jammed state.
Link adaptation techniques may be employed to mitigate the effects of interfering noise. However, conventional link adaptation techniques are not designed for such quick alternations between jammed and clear states. As a result, such techniques may merely revert to employing a modulation and coding scheme (MCS) having a lower data rate. Unfortunately, this may reduce throughput to unacceptable levels.