PCF: on exploiting spatial reuse and power conservation opportunities with power control and fairness mechanism for 802.11 WLAN

Exploiting spatial reuse opportunities allows more parallel transmissions and improve the throughput of wireless networks. Power control is one of the major mechanisms used to exploit both spatial reuse and power conservation opportunities. Increasing the transmitting power prevents the receiver from interference but consume power and create additional interference to other communicating nodes. On the contrary, reducing the transmitting power reduces the interference to other communicating pairs and save sender´s power consumption, but result a lower SNR (signal to noise ratio) at receiver side. This article presents power control MAC protocol to exploit the spatial reuse and power conservation opportunities for 802.11 wireless LAN. The proposed protocol evaluates the interference and adopts power control mechanism on both sender and receiver sides, trying to allow more communications proceeding simultaneously. In addition, a fairness control mechanism is also proposed to reduce the average communication delay and alleviate the packet lost phenomenon. Performance results reveal that the proposed protocol improves the throughput and power consumption of WLAN while the fairness among communicating pairs can be maintained.