Impact of adaptive carrier-sensing range on the performance of dense wireless networks

In this paper, we investigate the impact of the carrier-sensing range on the link performance in a dense wireless network. Considering small-scale fading effects, we fix the carrier-sensing threshold and adaptively adjust the carrier-sensing range. At first, we assume a close transmitter-receiver distance and model the network nodes as a homogeneous Poisson point process (PPP). Then we obtain the bounds of the carrier-sensing range by stochastic geometry approaches based on a simple analysis model of the conditional outage probability. Considering a trade-off between the spatial reuse and the collision avoidance, we incorporate the guard zone criteria into the carrier sensing mechanism. Consequently, the lower bound of the carrier-sensing range cannot be less than the guard zone size. Numerical results show that the proposed model enables the pending transmitter to adjust the bounds of the carrier-sensing range and the guard zone size adaptively when the channel pathloss exponent changes.