On optimal QoS-aware Physical Carrier Sensing for IEEE 802.11 based WLANs: Theoretical analysis and protocol design

In Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), traditional Physical Carrier Sensing (PCS), which aims at eliminating hidden terminals completely, brings too many exposed terminals and degrades the throughput seriously. Some existing work has proven that an aggressive PCS, which turns up the PCS threshold to allow the existence of hidden terminals, can improve the throughput by balancing the tradeoff between hidden terminals and exposed terminals. However, little work has been conducted to compute the optimal PCS threshold. To address this issue, in this paper we develop an analytical model, which can be used to compute the optimal PCS threshold and investigate the impact of the aggressive PCS on the Quality-of-Service (QoS) in terms of the packet loss rate. Then, we propose a QoS-aware aggressive PCS tuning algorithm, with which users can adapt the PCS threshold to the varying network conditions and the QoS requirement. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed algorithm obtains significant throughput gain compared to the traditional PCS and bounds the packet loss rate below the QoS requirement. The unfairness issue brought by the aggressive PCS is also discussed and evaluated with experimental results at the end of the paper