Wireless technologies are being used in various applications for their ease of deployment and inherent capabilities to support mobility. Most wireless standards support multiple data rates that may vary between a few Mbps to a few Gbps. Reaching the maximum supported data rate is what most applications seek. Nevertheless, the choice of data rates is very closely related to the quality of communication links and their stability. IEEE 802.11 standard introduced multi-rate support, since then, a lot of research has been done on rate adaptation, dealing with the different parameters that lead to an estimation of the channel conditions and the metrics that affect the network performance.In this seminar, I will talk about the importance of this topic and will present a performance evaluation study we have made using the ns-3 simulator where we evaluated popular rate adaptation algorithms from different categories in different scenarios.