Estimating the available medium access bandwidth of IEEE 802.11 ad hoc networks with concurrent transmissions

Concurrent transmission scheduling mechanisms can significantly improve the total throughput of IEEE 802.11 ad hoc networks. What remains unaddressed, however, is how to estimate the available medium access bandwidth (AB) of a link under concurrent transmission scenarios, i.e., the maximum throughput that can be obtained without violating the quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of the existing flows. In this paper, we focus on estimating the available medium AB of IEEE 802.11 ad hoc networks with the control-gap-based concurrent transmissions. We first introduce the upper bound of the AB of a link, and then, we present an algorithm to estimate the available transmission/reception duration of the node by a distributed manner. We further derive a preliminary estimation of the AB by analyzing the nonoverlap between the medium availability of the sender and recipient of a link. Finally, we refine the estimation by taking into account the transmission failures induced by hidden nodes and concurrent collisions. Extensive simulations demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed approach.