Experimental Evaluation of Starved AP Identification and Management Schemes in Mobile Cooperative WLAN System toward 5G

Throughput starvation, which occurs due to the well-known exposed/hidden terminal problem in CSMA/CA based channel access mechanisms, will be a critical problem for dense wireless LAN systems. To address this problem, we previously proposed schemes that identify and manage starved devices by monitoring the beacon signals transmitted by access points (APs) and showed that they can identify low throughput devices and have potential to improve WLAN system throughput. This paper describes experimental results obtained for schemes that identify starved APs and manage their channels. Numerous experiments verified that the schemes can identify APs that have quite low throughput as starved APs and that management can reduce the low throughput APs in real environments. We also indicate that it is necessary to consider beacon transmission delay fluctuation when determining the threshold used for identifying starved APs in cases such as the surrounding environment fluctuating in a short period.