A Simple Approach on Mitigating the Gray Zone Effect to Improve Throughput in IEEE802.11 Based Ad-Hoc Network

Abstract

In wireless ad-hoc networks, one of the reasons thatincrease the data packet loss rate is gray zone effect. Thegray zone effect can happen when broadcasting controlpackets with lower rate while transmitting the data packetswith such higher rate or the same PHY data rate. In thiscase, nodes are able to find valid routes but some datapackets may not reach the destination, which causes thehigh packet loss rate. Most research efforts so far haveattempted to modify the routing protocol to take the grayzone effect into consideration. This method, however, couldhave a detrimental performance owning to its high computationalcomplexity. In this paper, by adjusting the suitablebroadcast rate and data transmission rate, we can obtainhigher throughput than the original way. By simulations,we show that our simple approach can improve throughputsignificantly.