Dynamic Carrier-Sense Threshold Selection for Improving Spatial Reuse in Dense Wireless LANs

As density of a wireless LAN grows, per-user throughput degrades severely, deteriorating user experience. To improve service quality, it is important to increase system spectral efficiency. Controlling carrier-sense threshold is one of the key techniques to achieve the goal, because frequently transmissions are unnecessarily blocked by carrier sensing, even though these transmissions can take place without causing packet losses. Using high carrier-sense threshold and allowing nodes to transmit aggressively may increase the system throughput, but this approach can lead to unfair channel share and cause starvation for the edge nodes. In this paper, we propose a medium access control protocol where transmitters include the carrier-sense threshold required to protect its packet in the preamble. Nodes receiving the preamble only transmit concurrently, when they are confident that their own transmission as well as the on-going transmission will both be successfully received at the respective receivers. The simulation results show that this dual-threshold approach can achieve higher system throughput compared to using a single carrier-sense threshold, without penalizing edge nodes.