CSMA/CN+: improving the performance of collision notification for wireless LANs

In CSMA/CN, whenever inferring that a receiving frame gets corrupted, the receiver sends back its signature as a collision notification (CN) to the sender. Upon detecting an arrival of the CN, the sender will abort the ongoing transmission immediately. However, in low signal-to-interference-plus -noise ratio (SINR), the false alarm of the CN occurs frequently, which might force a sender not to transmit any frame at all. To overcome this drawback, this paper proposes CSMA/ CN+ to enhance the performance of CSMA/ CN. In CSMA/CN+, we introduce an additional signature. The receiver, adapting to channel conditions and self-signal suppression capability, prudently determines whether to send back zero, one, or two signatures to the sender. In this way, we can reduce or exclude false alarms and therefore improve the system performance. In this paper, we first present the design of CSMA/CN+. We then apply the design in a wireless LAN, and theoretically analyze the detection performance of the notification and the system throughput. Extensive simulations verify that CSMA/CN+ can remarkably improve the system throughput of CSMA/CN and our analysis is very accurate.