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Rate control algorithms for commercial 802.11 devices strongly rely on packet losses for their adaptation. As a result, they give poor performance in dense networks because they are not able to distinguish packet losses related to channel error from packet losses due to collision. In this paper, we evaluate automatic rate adaptation algorithms in IEEE 802.11 dense networks. A certain number of works in the literature address this problem, but they demand modifications of the IEEE standard, or depend on some special feature not available in off-the-shelf devices. In this context, we propose a new automatic rate control algorithm which is simple, easy to implement, standards-compliant, and well-suited for crowded 802.11 networks. Our approach consists of measuring the contention level, inferring the collision probability, and choosing transmission rates which maximize throughput. Results from simulation …