The Effect of Emerging Traffic Patterns on High Speed Wireless LANs

As average packet sizes in wireless networks shrink and data rates increase, the fundamental CSMA mechanism in the 802.11 protocol family is put under stress. With the emerging 802.11ax standard, the carrier sensing mechanism is lowering the efficiency of the protocol to the level of random access (ALOHA), and as future-generation 802.11 standards emerge, CSMA-based protocols will fall below this level. In this paper we make two main contributions to the literature. First, we will extend previous analysis to examine more closely the quality of the information obtained from channel sensing, in particular the probability of this information being incorrect and the correlation between true and sensed channel state. Second, we examine how to use this analysis to improve existing CSMA-based protocols, in particular the 802.11 protocol family.