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Carrier sensing and receiver performance in indoor IEEE 802.11b mesh networks

Published: 21 June 2009 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we address the following question: given a typical indoor IEEE 802.11 mesh network, how are carrier sensing, receiving and interference range related and how stable are they in time? To answer this question, we conducted broadcast measurements in the Berlin RoofNet testbed under saturated conditions using multiple simultaneous transmitters with either carrier sensing turned on and off, respectively.
In contrast to several prior studies, our results indicate that wireless mesh networks are much more deterministic, and they show a high stability even under self-induced interference. Interestingly, for IEEE 802.11b at 1Mbps, the interference range of a transmitter is only slightly larger than its receiving range. On the other hand, the carrier sensing range is slightly smaller than the receiving range. In particular, a packet success rate around 10% is a reasonable good indicator for carrier sensing. In addition, we identified uncontrolled external interference and environmental mobility as the key disturbing factors causing variations in packet reception.

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Cited By

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  • (2010)Joint Transmission Rate, Power, and Carrier Sense Settings: An Initial Measurement Study2010 Fifth IEEE Workshop on Wireless Mesh Networks10.1109/WIMESH.2010.5507901(1-6)Online publication date: Jun-2010
  • (2010)Opportunistic Routing with Adaptive CSMA/CA in Wireless Mesh Networks2010 IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference GLOBECOM 201010.1109/GLOCOM.2010.5683520(1-6)Online publication date: Dec-2010

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      IWCMC '09: Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing: Connecting the World Wirelessly
      June 2009
      1561 pages
      ISBN:9781605585697
      DOI:10.1145/1582379
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 21 June 2009

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      Author Tags

      1. carrier sensing
      2. receiver performance
      3. temporal link stability

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      • (2010)Joint Transmission Rate, Power, and Carrier Sense Settings: An Initial Measurement Study2010 Fifth IEEE Workshop on Wireless Mesh Networks10.1109/WIMESH.2010.5507901(1-6)Online publication date: Jun-2010
      • (2010)Opportunistic Routing with Adaptive CSMA/CA in Wireless Mesh Networks2010 IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference GLOBECOM 201010.1109/GLOCOM.2010.5683520(1-6)Online publication date: Dec-2010

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