  Advances in the price, performance, and power consumption of Wi-Fi (IEEE
802.11) technology have led to the adoption of wireless functionality in
diverse consumer electronics. These trends have enabled an exciting vision of
rich wireless applications that combine the unique features of different
devices for a better user experience. To meet the needs of these applications,
a wireless network must be configured well to provide good performance at the
physical layer. But because of wireless technology and usage trends, finding
these configurations is an increasingly challenging problem.
  Wireless configuration objectives range from simply choosing the fastest way
to encode data on a single wireless link to the global optimization of many
interacting parameters over multiple sets of communicating devices. As more
links are involved, as technology advances (e.g., the adoption of OFDM and MIMO
techniques in Wi-Fi), and as devices are used in changing wireless channels,
the size of the configuration space grows. Thus algorithms must find good
operating points among a growing number of options.
  ... continued inside thesis.
