Experimental approach to adaptive carrier sensing in IEEE 802.15.4 wireless networks

In carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) wireless networks, adaptive physical carrier sense (CS) mechanisms have been proposed to maximize spatial reuse and to mitigate packet collisions in various wireless networking environments. Most of them attempt to reduce the carrier sensing range for higher throughput performance as long as the signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) requirement is satisfied at the receiver. In this paper, we implement one of adaptive CS mechanisms in IEEE 802.15.4 wireless networks and show that the adaptation leads to significant throughput unfairness among wireless nodes. We propose an adaptive CS mechanism for fairness and empirically show that the proposed mechanism improves both the throughputand fairness performance in CSMA/CA wireless networks.