Preserving fairness in super dense WLANs

In this paper, after discussing the challenges raised by the increasing density of IEEE 802.11 WLANs, we investigate a new combination of transmit power control and physical carrier sensing adaptation to leverage the spatial reuse in high density deployments. While each of these techniques when applied separately is efficient in enhancing the performance of such dense scenarios, they suffer from serious fairness issues. After highlighting these issues in a dense simulation scenario, a new joint solution is proposed to elevate the unfairness problem especially in the presence of legacy nodes in the network. Extensive simulations show that the proposed technique is able to ameliorate the fairness in different situations, while improving the average throughput by 4 times compared to the standard performance.