Joint tuning of physical carrier sensing, power and rate in high-density WLAN

Fast proliferation of IEEE 802.11 wireless devices has led to the emergence of High-Density WLAN, where a large number(10s-100s) of Access Points(AP) are deployed to service a larger number(100s-1000s) of users. In such network it is a challenge to improve the throughput because each device has to share channel with all the other devices within its carrier sensing range. So some traditional settings of 802.11 devices need to be self-adaptively tuned. In this paper, we investigate the joint tuning of physical carrier sensing, transmission power and data rate in High-Density WLAN. With introducing an analytical model, we propose two simple yet effective tuning rules to maximize spatial reuse and keep the fairness among users. We also develop a distributed joint tuning algorithm based on these rules. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed joint tuning algorithm achieves significant improvements in both aggregate network throughput and fairness.