Simple and Effective Carrier Sensing Adaptation for Multi-rate Ad-Hoc MESH Networks
H. Ma and S. Roy
Submitted to to IEEE Trans. Mobile Comput. 2006
Abstract: Adaptive Physical Carrier Sensing(PCS) based on tuning the PCS threshold has been shown to be an effective mechanism for improving aggregate network throughput. However, the state-of-art assumed a link rate and a common PCS threshold for the entire network as appropriate for a regular 2-D lattice grid of nodes with constant link (1-hop) distances. However, in an ad-hoc network topology, 1-hop link distances may vary significantly and a single PCS threshold is no longer suitable. Because IEEE 802.11 a/b/g networks provide multiple data rates over any link, joint tuning of the link rate and PCS threshold is a logical approach for achieving optimal aggregate throughput for ad-hoc networks. In this work, we first propose a simple, novel yet effective principle for the above optimization. Next, we use the intuition offered by these formulations to suggest adaptive solutions for use at run-time in OPNET simulations. We restrict ourselves to 1-dimensional random linear networks primarily to corroborate analysis with simulations and defer results with other topologies for future work.