Impact of physical and virtual carrier sensing on the route discovery mechanism in noisy MANETs

In cellular consumer devices, one of the limiting factors for efficiency is that of overhead on the network layer that effects on the performance of the network. A substantial design issue is that, with cellular consumer devices, the discovery phase of the routing process, when attempting to establish a mobile ad hoc network, a high demand is placed on the network layer. Hence, a challenge for the designer is to reduce this demand, thus increasing overall device availability. Routing algorithms, and hence the performance of the networks are adversely affected by inefficient carrier sensing methods which can lead to increasing packet loss within the network environment. In this paper, the effect of physical and virtual carrier sensing on the route discovery mechanism has been identified and this paper suggests that choosing a suitable carrier sensing threshold in a high density and noisy mobile ad hoc network yields a better performance than if the default value is used¹.