Location enhancement to IEEE 802.11 DCF

Abstract
— In this paper, we propose an enhancement to the existing IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) MAC to improve channel spatial reuse efficiency, and thus improve data throughput. Our modification, named the Location Enhanced DCF (LED) for IEEE 802.11, incorporates location information in frame exchange sequences of the IEEE 802.11 DCF so that other stations sharing the communication channel are able to make better interference predictions and blocking assessments. When combined,with an underlying physical layer design that supports the capturing of stronger frames, the improved channel condition estimation by LED can increase overall network data throughput by encouraging more concurrent transmissions. In this paper we also analytically study the potential performance enhancement,of the LED over the original IEEE 802.11 DCF. The results are verified using the ns-2 simulator, which shows that up to 35% of DCF blocking decisions are unnecessary and our LED method can achieve up to 22% more throughput than the original DCF. I. I NTRODUCTION The IEEE 802.11 [1] is the most,popular standard for Wireless Local-Area Networks (WLANs). The IEEE 802.11 Medium,Access Control (MAC) specifies two different mech-

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