Performance enhancement of overlapping BSSs via dynamic transmit power control

Abstract

In densely deployed wireless local area networks (WLANs), overlapping basic service sets (BSSs) may suffer from severe performance degradations. Mobile stations in a BSS may compete for channel access with stations that belong to another BSS in such environment, and it reduces overall throughput due to the increased collision probability. In this paper, we propose a new scheme for transmit power control, which enables mobile stations to dynamically adjust their transmit powers. Using our mechanism, those stations in different BSSs will have more chances of simultaneous transmissions and thus improve their performances by enhancing spatial reuse. We develop a Markov chain model to analyze the performance of the proposed scheme and also perform extensive simulations. Both the analytical and simulation results show that our mechanism effectively improves the network performance of WLANs.