Capture-aware staggering for concurrent transmissions
Naveen Santhapuri, Srihari Nelakuditi, Romit Roy Choudhury · 2007
802.11 requires bidirectional exchange (i.e., nodes reverse their roles as transmitters and receivers) and hence neighbors of both the transmitter and receiver must keep quiet for the entire duration of communication. This degrades spatial reuse, leading to low network throughput. To address this problem, power control, rate control, and carrier-sense adaptations have successfully identified possibilities of concurrency in the spatial domain. In the temporal domain, optimizations such as piggybacked Acks [1] have reduced role reversals, also enabling concurrency. Though beneficial, these improvements are bounded by the SINR requirement. Recent studies found that the SINR threshold is a dynamic value, dependent on the relative order in which the signal and the interference arrive at the receiver. This implies that under certain conditions, it might be feasible to capture a data frame in the presence of concurrent interference. If harnessed carefully, this can help improve the spatial reuse of wireless networks.