Controlling Unfairness due to Physical Layer Capture and Channel Bonding in 802.11n+s Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

This paper analyzes the effect of physical layer capture (PLC) and channel bonding over high throughput wireless mesh backbone network built over IEEE 802.11n+s standard. With the help of PLC, a signal can be recovered from channel noise and interference if the difference between the received signal strengths is more than a predefined threshold. It is well known that PLC can affect fairness during channel access by biasing towards the link with better signal strength. In this paper, we show that in the presence of channel bonding, high throughput links always suffer due to PLC, that ensues severe unfairness in a mesh backbone network. As a consequence, the performance of the network drops significantly from its actual capacity. This paper presents an adaptive bonding opportunity and channel reservation scheme to mitigate from network unfairness in an IEEE 802.11n+s mesh network. The performance of the proposed scheme is analyzed and evaluated using a 13 node mesh networking testbed. It has been observed that the adaptive bonding opportunity and channel reservation performs significantly better in terms of fairness compared to the standard, and results in a notable performance improvement for end-to-end flow parameters.