Location-Aware IEEE 802.11 for Spatial Reuse Enhancement

In this paper, we propose an enhancement to the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF). The enhancement improves the level of channel spatial reuse; thus, it improves overall network data throughput in dense deployments. Our modification, named the location-enhanced DCF (LED), incorporates location information in DCF frame exchange sequences so that stations sharing the communication channel are able to make better interference predictions and blocking assessments. Hence, more concurrent transmissions can be conducted in densely deployed wireless LANs. The potential performance enhancement of LED is studied both analytically and via ns-2 simulations. The results show that the LED method achieves significant throughput improvements over the original DCF.