When I did my previous work with mac0211_hwsim, I wrote the channel model in matlab and pre-generated a huge lookup table of frame error rates for different SNR values and transmission rates so that the simulator didn’t have to do any thinking for each packet. Obviously that’s a bit limiting and not in any way upstreamable in something like wmediumd.
So, I sat down today and rewrote it in C to see how bad the computation is. Actually, it’s not awful: I didn’t carefully benchmark it, but it sits at around 30 µsec per calculation, and there is probably a good deal of low hanging fruit such as making factorial() cache its computations, or fitting the output curves with cubics. I stuck the initial code on a wmediumd topic branch over here.
I verified the output matched my matlab code and charted it as above. Careful observers will note the 9 mbps rate is always worse than 12 mbps; this was a finding of D. Qiao and S. Choi in “Goodput enhancement of IEEE 802.11a wireless LAN via link adaptation,†in Proc. IEEE ICC01, from which most of my math was appropriated.