An adaptive rate and carrier sense threshold algorithm to enhance throughput and fairness for dense WLANs

With an exponential increase of smart devices, there is accumulated interference from neighboring BSSs resulting in a significant degradation in performance in high density WLANs. The adaptation of clear channel assessment is considered as a potential technology to manager the OBSS issues. The object of our study is to improve spatial utilization efficiency of WLAN with node's local information. We first define SINR-based communication model that is used for interference analysis in high density WLANs and analyze fairness using the backoff frequency of transmitting a packet and the number of detected nodes in carrier sensing range. We propose a distributed heuristic algorithm that used to determine data rate and CST values of STAs. Finally, we validate the proposed scheme using simulations in ns-3 and the results show that our propose scheme is promising to improve spatial reuse and fairness.