Improving Spatial Reuse of Wireless LAN Uplink Using BSS Color and Proximity Information

Abstract

With the density of wireless networks increasing rapidly, one of the major goals in next-generation wireless LANs (Local Area Networks) is to support a very dense network with a large number of closely deployed APs (Access Points) and crowded users. However, the CSMA (Carrier-Sense Multiple Access)-based medium access control of current wireless network systems suffers from significantly degraded performance when the network becomes dense. Recent WLAN (Wireless Local Area Networks) standards include measures for increasing spatial reuse such as BSS (Basic Service Set) coloring, but the schemes based on BSS coloring such as OBSS/PD (Overlapping BSS/Preamble Detection) have limitations in improving spatial reuse. In this paper, we propose a spatial reuse method for uplink which can utilize BSS color and proximity information to improve the efficiency of carrier sensing and thus spatial reuse. Specifically, through the BSS color and the proximity information, a node receiving a preamble can figure out how far the receiver of the ongoing traffic is located. This information is used to determine whether the node should aggressively start transmitting or defer its transmission to protect the ongoing transmission. Simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms existing methods in terms of throughput and fairness.

Keywords

• wireless LAN
• spatial reuse
• medium access control
• BSS color
• proximity information