Rate, power and carrier-sense threshold coordinated management for high-density IEEE 802.11 networks

Nowadays, trying to obtain better coverage and performance, and allowed by the low-hardware prices, it is common to deploy a large number of IEEE 802.11 devices in offices, meeting rooms or auditoriums configuring the so called high-density networks. In such a scenario, the shared nature of the transmission medium causes interference problems. Some physical-layer- and link-layer-adaptation mechanisms to palliate those problems have been developed, however, most of them have not been independently implemented and assessed. In this paper, we implement in a simulator some of the existent solutions, compare them in a simulation environment and show that, in some situations, the existing solutions can lead to a starvation problem. Finally, we propose a new mechanism that manages datarate, transmit power and carrier-sense threshold to ameliorate this problem.