Understanding the real-world performance of carrier sense

Carrier sense is a fundamental part of most wireless networking stacks in wireless local area- and sensor networks. As increasing numbers of users and more demanding applications push wireless networks to their capacity limits, the efficacy of the carrier sense mechanism becomes a key factor in determining wireless network capacity. We describe how carrier sense works, point out its limitations, and advocate an experimental approach to studying carrier sense. We describe our current testbed setup, and then present preliminary experimental results from both a 60-node sensor network deployment and a small-scale 802.11 deployment. Our preliminary results evaluate how well carrier sense works and expose its limitations.