Dynamic Sensitivity Control to improve Spatial Reuse in Dense Wireless LANs

With the proliferation of wireless LANs, we are in an era of densification. Whilst densification could lead to increased coverage (neighbouring APs belonging to the same administrative domain), which is good news, it could also lead to increased interference (neighbouring APs not belonging to the same administrative domain). In particular, in the latter case, nodes (both APs and STAs) in neighbouring networks could carrier sense each other and resist from transmitting when in fact a parallel transmission could have been harmless. Thus, improving spatial reuse in such scenarios is crucial to improving performance in dense deployments otherwise the efficiency is likely to take a hit. This paper elaborates on dynamic sensitivity control (DSC), a way of adapting the carrier sensing threshold dynamically to address the aforementioned issue and presents results from a simulation based study aimed at evaluating the proposed method. Findings indicate that the gains achievable from deploying DSC vary significantly depending on the operating conditions and therefore, choosing a fixed conservative threshold at design time, as has been the case traditionally, may not be an appropriate decision. We also show that enabling DSC at the AP may bring benefits with the performance approaching that of the traditional method (of not adapting sensitivity) in the conservative case.