Cochannel interference avoidance algorithm in 802.11 wireless LANs

We study the MAC performance of IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks in the presence of the cochannel interference. Simulation results show that the interfered stations experience increased contention due to the exposed terminal effect. Furthermore, the cochannel interference presents a hidden terminal problem which causes all stations suffer in receiving packets from the access point. Realizing the traditional RTS/CTS that used to cope with the hidden terminal effect is not throughput efficient in this cochannel interference setting, we propose an interference avoidance algorithm to mitigate the interference effect from the neighbor BSS operating at the same channel. In scenarios of web browsing interfered by neighbor traffics, our algorithm improves the MAC throughput by more than 15% and reduces the delay by nearly 100%.