Remedy of hidden terminal problem using station migration

Abstract

Interferences have been spotted as main performance bottleneck in Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). Especially in current wireless environments, enormous growth in the number of smart devices which have the wireless network connection brings the higher interferences that degrade the total performance of the wireless network. Among the interferences in wireless network, the impact of the hidden terminal problem, which is a well-known problem in literature, has devastating consequences for the wireless stations. In this paper, we propose the novel station migration scheme that mitigates the hidden terminal problem by migrating the stations to another AP which operates on different channel not producing the hidden terminal problem. Therefore, victim stations of the hidden terminal problem can be rescued without physically changing their locations. The proposed scheme is implemented on commercial Access Points (APs) and smartphones, and its performance is evaluated through the experiments, which shows the effectiveness of station migration in real testbed environments. Additionally, the migration delay takes 1~2 seconds which is acceptable while the hidden terminal problem constantly degrades the performance of the stations. Our proposed scheme does not require the modification in legacy IEEE 802.11 standards on client side and can be implemented by any wireless network vendors.