In Defense of Wireless Carrier Sense
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Morris_In defense.pdf
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Author(s)
Brodsky, Micah Z. (Micah Zev)
Morris, Robert Tappan
Date Issued
August 2009
Journal
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2009 conference on Data communication (SIGCOMM '09)
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Citation
Micah Z. Brodsky and Robert T. Morris. 2009. In defense of wireless carrier sense. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2009 conference on Data communication (SIGCOMM '09). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 147-158.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Carrier sense is often used to regulate concurrency in wireless medium access control (MAC) protocols, balancing interference protection and spatial reuse. Carrier sense is known to be imperfect, and many improved techniques have been proposed. Is the search for a replacement justified? This paper presents a theoretical model for average case two-sender carrier sense based on radio propagation theory and Shannon capacity. Analysis using the model shows that carrier sense performance is surprisingly close to optimal for radios with adaptive bitrate. The model suggests that hidden and exposed terminals usually cause modest reductions in throughput rather than dramatic decreases. Finally, it is possible to choose a fixed sense threshold which performs well across a wide range of scenarios, in large part due to the role of the noise floor. Experimental results from an indoor 802.11 testbed support these claims.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/1594977.1592587
