On the throughput issue when IEEE 802.11 meets with WANETs

WANETs (Wide-Area wireless NETworks) is a recent network architecture where the nodes are spread out all over the world but behave exactly as if they are part of a single-hop or multi-hop wireless network at the PHY and MAC layers. At the same time, IEEE 802.11 devices are popular all over the world. When IEEE 802.11 meets with WANETs, the transparent Software Defined Access Points (SoDA) in WANETs will prevent IEEE 802.11 devices from utilizing the spatial reuse opportunities effectively and thus may underutilize the wireless medium. In this paper, we propose a scheme to utilize the delay experienced by the packets to address the throughput issue when IEEE 802.11 meets with WANETs. We build a wireless network testbed to evaluate the proposed scheme. Our implementation experiences show that the proposed scheme can make the IEEE 802.11 devices which locate in geographically separate locations utilize the parallel transmission opportunities effectively.