Starved wireless LAN device identifying scheme using beacon signals

Throughput starvation, which occurred under well-known exposed/hidden terminal problem in CSMA/CA based channel access mechanisms, will be a critical problem for future wireless LAN systems. This paper describes new schemes that identify starved access points (APs) and user equipments (UEs). One scheme identifies starved APs by observing the delay of beacon signals periodically transmitted by APs. The other identifies starved UEs by observing the miscaptured beacon signals ratio at UEs. Numerous computer simulations verified that the schemes can identify starved APs and UEs having quite low throughput and are superior to graph-based identification schemes.