RCBurst: A mechanism to mitigate the impact of hidden terminals in home WLANs

In dense wireless deployments, such as Enterprise WLANs (EWLANs) and home WLANs, interference may occur because of neighbouring WLANs sharing the same unlicensed spectrum. Mechanisms to centrally manage WLAN deployments cannot effectively mitigate the interference caused by hidden terminals (HTs) in WLANs that belong to different organisations. Furthermore, the impact of interference is amplified if it is combined with long-lived TCP traffic flows, which are becoming increasingly commonplace. In this paper, we focus on mitigating the impact of HTs on long-lived TCP flows in home WLANs. In particular, we study the effect of five key factors on long-lived TCP flows under the impact of HTs: packet bursting, backoff mechanisms, maximum number of RTS attempts, capture affect and the number of associated clients with the same Access Point (AP). Extensive simulation results show that a combination between RTS/CTS messages and bursting increases the throughput up to 8× in the presence of HTs. Therefore, we develop a mechanism called joint RTS/CTS with Bursting (RCBurst) that leverages RTS/CTS messages and packet bursting to mitigate the impact of HTs. The simulation results show that RCBurst achieves an improvement of up to 0.3 in Jain's fairness index over the conventional CSMA/CA, without reducing the overall throughput.