Evaluation of Multi-Carrier Burst Contention and IEEE 802.11 with fading during channel sensing

With the prevalence of wireless capability in mobile devices and the increasing number of wireless network deployments where protocols using carrier sensing (such as IEEE 802.11) are employed, it is important to understand the impact of fading during the channel sensing period and its direct effects on performance in realistic environments. In this paper we evaluate the performance of IEEE 802.11 and that of our proposed cross-layer Multi-Carrier Burst Contention (MCBC) protocol, which we have implemented in hardware, in realistic indoor fading environments with no direct line of sight. We present thorough simulation results, backed up by hardware and real-world measurements, performance issues for each protocol and describe methods for increasing resilience to fading during channel sensing in order to improve performance.