A Cross-Layer OBSS Interference Management Scheme for High Efficiency WLAN

High Efficiency WLAN (HEW) focuses on improving metrics that reflect user experience, such as average per station throughput, the 5th percentile of per station throughput of a group of stations, and area throughput. In order to improve area throughput, Access Points (APs) are densely deployed to increase spatial multiplexing due to the short-range communication links. Thus, Overlapping Basic Service Set (OBSS) interference management is one of the major techniques in HEW. More specifically, in the four-way handshake transmission mode, the transmission of control frames increase interference area, such that some conflict-free transmissions cannot be active at the same time. In this paper, we design an OBSS interference management scheme to increase the spatial reusing ratio. We evaluate the performance of our OBSS interference management scheme under NS3 platform by testing different large-scale network scenarios. We also implement our scheme using Wireless Open-Access Research Platform (WARP). Our experiment results show that the proposed scheme can efficiently improve network area throughput.