Bringing Spatial Reuse Into Practice for Distributed Wi-Fi Networks: Preamble Detection and Anomalies

There have been long efforts to refine Wi-Fi carrier sensing (CS) for more aggressive channel access, in pursuit of enhanced network performance. To this end, the recent 802.11ax amendment introduced a preamble detection (PD)-based spatial reuse, allowing concurrent transmissions between adjacent links via adjustable sensitivity levels. Against these conventional ideas, this paper presents a different perspective: Wi-Fi devices already have excessive transmission (TX) opportunities in practice, even without detecting each other under certain scenarios. We shed light on CS anomalies relevant to undetected preambles, which not only cause adjacent devices to transmit concurrently but are also triggered by the new PD-based mechanism, ultimately disrupting its intended operations. Our testbed experiments and in-depth scrutiny reveal the dominant impact of these anomalies on overall network behaviors. Based on these insights, we present two comprehensive frameworks, REFRAIN and AdOPT, to fully exploit TX opportunities enabled by the anomalies and PD-based mechanism respectively, for practical spatial reuse. Prototypes using commercialWi-Fi devices and NI USRP show the feasibility and effectiveness of our approaches. Extensive simulation results further demonstrate that REFRAIN and AdOPT achieve up to 1.94× and 1.61× higher average throughput, only with reduced transmission attempts by half, highlighting their potential to elevate network capacity and efficiency in practical Wi-Fi networks.