Distributed Power Control for Enhanced Spatial Reuse in CSMA/CA Based Wireless Networks

Exposed terminals are critical performance degrading factors in wireless networks adopting carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA). The objective of this paper is to minimize the exposed terminals and enhance spatial reuse. Therefore, an analytical model is provided to show how much gain can be obtained by resolving the exposed sender (EXS) and exposed receiver (EXR) problems in terms of capacity and delay. It is shown that resolving EXS and EXR both outperform the conventional CSMA/CA significantly. In addition, a transmission power control scheme that can jointly address the hidden and exposed terminal problem is introduced. Results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms the other schemes in terms of spatial reuse, power consumption, and thus, the overall throughput and energy efficiency improves.