iDLS: Inter-BSS direct link setup in IEEE 802.11 WLANs

Existing 802.11 direct link setup (DLS) protocol specifies procedures for direct communication between a pair of stations within the same basic service set (BSS). This eliminates the unnecessary triangular traffic route through an access point and increases the overall effective throughput within the BSS. In this paper, an inter-BSS direct link setup (iDLS) protocol is proposed to facilitate direct link set up across BSS with the aim of increasing the overall throughput of a set of BSS. A preliminary version of the proposed iDLS protocol is implemented on commercial Atheros chipset based WLAN cards using the MADWiFi open source Linux driver. Our indoor measurement showed that, with pre-calibration on the neighbor sensing range parameter, the average throughput performance of using iDLS can be 24 times that of the conventional infrastructure mode without iDLS.