Carrier sensing-aware rate control mechanism for future efficient WLANs

The rate control mechanism is an effective way to improve the overall system performance in IEEE 802.11 multi-rate networks. However, in dense environments, due to the large number of contending nodes, the packet collisions trigger unfairly the rate control mechanism to decrease the transmission data rate. In this work, we address the performance degradation problem of rate control caused by these unnecessary data rate decrements. A physical carrier sensing adaptation enhances the spatial reuse and paves the way to an adapted rate control algorithm to boost the performance of the network. Extensive simulations show a gain of 260% in achieved throughput compared to the conventional scenario.