Physical layer capture aware MAC for WLANs

The physical layer capture (PLC) effect occurs frequently in the real wireless deployment; when two or more nodes transmit simultaneously, a receiver can successfully decode the collided frame if the signal strength of one frame is sufficiently high enough. Although the PLC effect increases the channel utilization, it results in an unfair channel access among the wireless nodes. In this paper, we propose a PLC-aware media access control (MAC) algorithm that employs the average waiting time as a common control reference. It enables the nodes to converge to a fair channel access by changing one of the IEEE 802.11 enhanced distributed channel access parameters: contention window, arbitration interframe space, or transmission opportunity. We then find multiple control references that meet the fair channel access constraint and obtain the near-optimal reference that maximizes the overall throughput. Through ns-2 simulations and real in-door experiments using the universal software radio peripheral platform, we evaluate the fairness and throughput performance of the PLC-aware MAC algorithm.