Dynamic sensitivity control of access points for IEEE 802.11ax

The popularity and wider acceptance of IEEE 802.11 based WLANs has resulted in their dense deployments in diverse environments. While this massive deployment can potentially increase capacity and coverage, the current physical carrier sensing of IEEE 802.11 cannot limit the overall interference induced and also cannot insure high concurrency among transmissions. Recently, the IEEE 802.11 working group has continued efforts on developing WLAN technology through the creation of the TGax, which aims to improve efficiency of densely deployed IEEE 802.11 networks. In this paper, we propose a Dynamic Sensitivity Control for Access Point (DSC-AP) algorithm for IEEE 802.11ax. This algorithm dynamically adjusts the Carrier Sensing Threshold (CST) of an AP based on received signal strength from its associated stations and interfering APs. We show that the aggregate throughput of a dense network (under asymmetric traffic conditions) utilizing DSC (both at the stations and AP) is considerably improved (i.e. up to 32%) when compared with legacy IEEE 802.11.