Taking the sting out of carrier sense: interference cancellation for wireless LANs

A fundamental problem with unmanaged wireless networks is high packet loss rates and poor spatial reuse, especially with bursty traffic typical of normal use. To address these limitations, we explore the notion of interference cancellation for unmanaged networks - the ability for a single receiver to disambiguate and successfully receive simultaneous overlapping transmissions from multiple unsynchronized sources. We describe a practical algorithm for interference cancellation, and implement it for ZigBee using software radios. In this setting, we find that our techniques can reduce packet loss rate and substantially increase spatial reuse. With carrier sense set to prevent concurrent sends, our approach reduces the packet loss rate during collisions from 14% to 8% due to improved handling of hidden terminals. Conversely, disabling carrier sense reduces performance for only 7% of all pairs of links and increases the delivery rate for the median pair of links in our testbed by a factor of 1.8 due to improved spatial reuse.