RSS-Based Grouping Strategy for Avoiding Hidden Terminals with GS-DCF MAC Protocol

摘要

Due to the massive growth in the number of wireless devices and their traffic, the problem of sharing channel access has become much severe in wireless networks. Group Synchronized Distributed Coordination Function (GS-DCF) was introduced in the IEEE 802.11ah standard to group users and give each group a Restricted Access Window (RAW) to compete in. However, how to group users remains an open issue which has a great impact on the network performance. In this paper, an RSS- based grouping strategy is proposed to solve the hidden terminal problem in wireless networks. The analytical and simulation results are then provided to demonstrate the advantages of this scheme over conventional grouping strategies. According to the results, the proposed RSS-based grouping scheme will make the probability of hidden terminal negligible and thus substantially improve the network performance.