Virtual multi-AP access for transport-level quality improvement in wireless local area networks with hidden stations

The demand of using applications that assume bidirectional communication such as voice telephony and peer-to-peer using wireless stations has been increasing and especially, the rapid increase of uplink traffic from wireless terminals is expected. However, in uplink WLANs, the hidden-station problem remains to be solved. In this paper, we point out this hidden-station problem and clarify the following unfairness between UDP and TCP uplink flows: 1) the effect of collision caused by hiddenstation relationship on throughput and 2) the instability of the throughput depending on the number of hidden stations. To solve these problems, we propose a virtual multi-AP access mechanism. Our mechanism first groups stations according to the hidden-station relationship and type of transport protocol they use then assigns a virtually isolated channel to each group, which enables STAs to communicate as if STAs in different groups are connected to different isolated APs (virtual APs: VAPs). It can mitigate the effect caused by collisions between hidden stations and eliminate the contention between UDP and TCP uplink flows. Its performance is shown through simulation. Copyright