Distributed adaptive power control in IEEE 802.11 wireless networks

Optimizing spectral reuse is a major issue in large-scale IEEE 802.11 wireless networks. Power control is an effective means for doing so. Much previous work simply assumes that each transmitter should use the minimum transmit power needed to reach its receiver, and that this would maximize the network capacity by increasing spectral reuse. It turns out that this is not necessarily the case, primarily because of hidden nodes. In a network without power control, it is well known that hidden nodes give rise to unfair network bandwidth distributions and large bandwidth oscillations. Avoiding hidden nodes (by extending the carrier-sensing range), however, may cause the network to have lower overall network capacity. This paper shows that in a network with power control, reducing the instances of hidden nodes can not only prevent unfair bandwidth distributions, but also achieve higher overall network capacity compared with the minimum-transmit-power approach. We propose and investigate two distributed adaptive power control algorithms that minimize mutual interferences among links while avoiding hidden nodes. In general, our power control algorithms can boost the capacity of ordinary non-power-controlled 802.11 networks by more than two times while eliminating hidden nodes.