A Simple Approach on Mitigating the Gray Zone Effect to Improve Throughput in IEEE802.11 Based Ad-Hoc Network

In wireless ad-hoc networks, one of the reasons that increase the data packet loss rate is gray zone effect. The gray zone effect can happen when broadcasting control packets with lower rate while transmitting the data packets with such higher rate or the same PHY data rate. In this case, nodes are able to find valid routes but some data packets may not reach the destination, which causes the high packet loss rate. Most research efforts so far have attempted to modify the routing protocol to take the gray zone effect into consideration. This method, however, could have a detrimental performance owning to its high computational complexity. In this paper, by adjusting the suitable broadcast rate and data transmission rate, we can obtain higher throughput than the original way. By simulations, we show that our simple approach can improve throughput significantly.