A Lightweight Method for Estimating the Number of Contending Terminals using Reviewer-side Information in Wi-Fi Networks
Jaehyuk Choi, Chong-kwon Kim · 2011
IEEE 802.1l-operated wireless LAN (Wi-Fi) performance is largely determined by the number of contending terminals on the shared medium due to the distributed nature of the MAC protocol. Due to this reason, there have been several estimation schemes for measuring the number of contending terminals, which can he applied for various Wi-Fi optimizations. However, most previous schemes require complex calculations and/or lengthy physical-level monitoring duration for its estimation. In this paper, we present a new and simple scheme that accurately estimates the number of contending terminals in a Wi-Fi network. Our proposed solution utilizes the sequence of successfully-received packets, which are readily observable at an access point (AP). The scheme determines whether each associated terminal is active or not based on a comparison between measured sequences and analytically derived legitimate probability. The evaluation results show that our scheme is very accurate in estimating the number of competing terminals.