Analysis of packet arrival model for 802.11 protocol under hidden terminals and asynchronous MPR detection

The hidden terminal (HT) problem occurs in a wireless network when there are stations (STAs) that are not able to hear each other, therefore they sense the channel as inactive and try both to transmit simultaneously to an access point (AP) that is visible to both, causing a collision. In this case, the throughput of the network is greatly affected. Traditionally, the 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) protocol provides a partial solution to this problem, in terms of avoiding collision by means of the carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) protocol with RTS/CTS handshaking; however, the obtained performance is low. In addition, when the asynchronous transmission of the HT is considered, the contention mechanism is useless. In this work we show that the HT problem with asynchronous transmission can be managed by employing an AP with asynchronous multiple packet reception (MPR) capability and a media access control (MAC) that supports the MPR capacity. Analytical formulas are obtained and corroborated by simulation. They show that a considerable improvement on the system performance can be obtained by using the analyzed cross-layer model.