Improved Spatial Reuse for Dense 802.11 WLANs

Next generation 802.11 networks aim to significantly increase spectral frequency reuse and manage interference between neighboring Overlapping Basic Service Sets (OBSS) in scenarios with a high density of both STAs and APs . In this paper, we study the theoretical throughput gains that may be obtained by using ideal spatial reuse in a densely occupied two-BSS network operating in saturated uplink traffic conditions (i.e. the transmission queue is never empty). We then compare the theoretical throughput gains with the gains obtained by implementing a practical spatial reuse technique in a residential scenario [6] using a discrete event simulator that integrates both the PHY and the MAC [7]. Our results show that the trends identified in the simple analysis are present in the empirical simulation and demonstrate that the gains obtained may depend on the scenario. We also conclude that additional spatial re-use techniques may be needed to extract all the gains promised by the theoretical analysis.