Optimizing 802.11 Wireless Mesh Networks Based on Physical Carrier Sensing

Multi-hop ad hoc networks suffer from the "Hidden" and "Exposed" node problems which diminish aggregate network throughput. While there are various approaches to mitigating these problems, in this work the authors focus exclusively on the role of Physical Carrier Sensing (PCS). Specifically, tuning the PCS threshold leads to a trade-off between the hidden and exposed cases; reducing one typically increases the other, implying the existence of an optimal PCS threshold setting maximizes the aggregate network throughput.