The Hidden Cost of Hidden Terminals

The performance unfairness problem in a single cell IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN) is considered. While existing research is based on the assumption that all nodes have the same transmission success probability and per-node throughput, this fairness exists only if all nodes within range of the access point can sense each other. Recent measurements suggest that this is not necessarily true and terminals can be hidden from each other. In this paper, the impact of hidden terminals on the performance unfairness among individual nodes is investigated via analysis, simulation and experimental measurements in a real network. In the presence of hidden terminals, it is observed that the widely accepted conclusion of equal performance among nodes does not hold any more. Instead, nodes far from the access point (AP) see more hidden terminals than those close to the AP, so they get more packet losses and lower throughput. This phenomenon is not due to inter-cell interference, or channel disparities among nodes, and is significant even when the RTS/CTS mechanism designed to mitigate the impact of hidden terminals is turned on. The simulation results show that for a 16-node WLAN with a fixed data rate of 6 Mbps, the throughput of a node close to the AP is more than twice that of an edge node, due to hidden terminals.