Alleviating Hidden and Exposed Nodes in High-Throughput Wireless Mesh Networks

This paper proposes an opportunistic approach to mitigating the hidden and exposed node problem in a high-throughput mesh network, by exploiting the frame aggregation and block acknowledgment (BACK) capabilities of IEEE 802.11n/ac wireless networking standard. Hidden nodes significantly drop down the throughput of a wireless mesh network by increasing data loss due to collision, whereas exposed nodes cause under-utilization of the achievable network capacity. The problem becomes worse in IEEE 802.11n/ac supported high-throughput mesh networks, due to the large physical layer frame size and prolonged channel reservation from frame aggregation. The proposed approach uses the standard carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) technology along with an opportunistic collision avoidance (OCA) method that blocks the communication for hidden nodes and opportunistically allows exposed nodes to communicate with the peers. The performance of the proposed CSMA/OCA mechanism for high throughput mesh networks is studied using the results from an IEEE 802.11n+s wireless mesh networking testbed, and the scalability of the scheme has been analyzed using simulation results.