HIATus: Hidden Interference-Aware Transmission Bandwidth Adjustment in IEEE 802.11ac WLANs

Changmok Yang, Seongwon Kim, Seongho Byeon, Sunghyun Choi

Abstract: In the IEEE 802.11ac wide bandwidth operation, interference may exist only on secondary channels. In particular, if the interference is not sensed at the transmitter, i.e., the interference is hidden, performance can be severely degraded. This problem cannot be resolved with RTS/CTS if the hidden interference is also not sensed at the receiver. We propose a hidden interference-aware bandwidth adjustment (HIATus) to resolve the problem, which uses error statistics to detect the hidden interference and adjusts transmission bandwidth to avoid hidden interference on the secondary channel. We evaluate the feasibility of HIATus with extensive measurement and analysis. When hidden interference exists on the secondary channel, HIATus is expected to achieve up to 14.4× higher throughput compared with the baseline 802.11ac.