Damysus: A Practical IEEE 802.11ax BSS Color Aware Rate Control Algorithm

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11ax Spatial Reuse (SR) is a new feature in the IEEE 802.11 family, aiming at improving the spectrum efficiency and the network performance in dense deployments. The main and perhaps the only SR technique in that amendment is the Basic Service Set (BSS) Color. It aims at increasing the number of concurrent transmissions in a specific area, based on a newly defined Overlapping BSS/Preamble-Detection threshold. In this paper, we overview the latest developments introduced in the IEEE 802.11ax for the SR and propose a rate control algorithm developed to exploit the BSS Color scheme. Our proposed algorithm, Damysus is specifically designed to function in dense environments where other off-the-shelf algorithms show poor performance. Simulation results in various dense scenarios, show a clear performance improvement of up to 113% gain in throughput over the well known MinstrelHT algorithm.