Fairness Enhancement for 802.11 MAC

Location dependency and its associated exposed receiver problem create the most severe unfairness scenario of the CSMA/CA protocol. An analytical model is built up to study the success probabilities of RTS reception and RTS/CTS handshake of the typical disadvantaged link under the exposed receiver scenario. Derived from the analytical insights, we propose a receiver assistance feature (RcvAssist) for the CSMA/CA protocol which not only significantly enhances the fairness of disadvantaged links suffering from exposed receiver problem, but also increases the overall throughput without introducing other side effects, such as aggregating the hidden terminal problem.