Investigating Physical Carrier Sensing in the DCF with Multiple Traffic Flows

Appendix: Multi-Flow Performance of Different PHY Rates

We have characterized the same quad-flow network for different PHY rates we well. This appendix summarizes that study.

Experiment Setup

To test the different PHY rates, we sought to further eliminate uncontrolled variables by conducting the experiment over RF cabling and attenuators.

The above figure shows the experimental setup. The RF power splitter/combiner used is a ​Mini-Circuits ZAPD-2-272+. The above configuration of attenuators roughly approximates an equilateral triangle topology, where each of the three nodes is connected with and is in carrier sensing range of the other two.

• Packet Length: 1400 byte payloads (1428 byte MPDUs, with MAC header and FCS)
• Tx Power: 5 dBm
• Trial Duration: 300 seconds
• 2.4GHz channel 1
• Physical Carrier Sensing Threshold: approximately -70 dBm

Results

The data shown below uses the same visualizations that are explained in the original application note.

PHY Rate	Throughput vs. Time	Throughput Histogram
6 Mbps
9 Mbps
12 Mbps
18 Mbps
24 Mbps
36 Mbps
48 Mbps
54 Mbps