FACT: Fine-Grained Adaptation of Carrier Sense Threshold in IEEE 802.11 WLANs

A fine-grained carrier sense threshold (CST) adaptation method, which controls CST, depending on both the interferer and destination nodes, is proposed to improve spatial reuse in wireless local area networks (WLANs). The proposed method utilizes predefined functions in the WLAN standard, thus making itself easily implementable in commercial WLAN devices. A supplementary clear channel assessment (CCA) method is also proposed to further enhance network performance by reducing CCA overhead. The performance of the proposed methods is comparatively evaluated via ns-3 simulation. Simulation results show that the proposed methods significantly improve network throughput compared with the legacy method in a two-cell environment.