Adaptive Carrier Sense With Enhanced Fairness in IEEE 802.15.4 Wireless Networks

The authors propose an adaptive Carrier Sense (CS) scheme with enhanced fairness based on the observation that conventional adaptive CS mechanisms may lead to significant unfairness. Their experiments with an IEEE 802.15.4 testbed show that the proposed algorithm significantly improves fairness while providing competitive throughput performance. Physical carrier sense is a fundamental mechanism that determines network performance in Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) wireless networks. To this end, carrier sensing is typically implemented using a Carrier Sense (CS) threshold; if the received signal strength at a node exceeds the CS threshold, it considers the wireless channel busy, and defers its transmission until the wireless channel becomes idle.