  Joint access point (AP) association and physical carrier sensing (PCS)
threshold selection has the potential to improve the performance in high
density wireless LANs (WLANs) under high contention, interference and
self-interference (SI) limited transmissions. Using tools from stochastic
geometry, user and AP locations are independent realizations of spatial point
processes. Considering the inherent effects of the channel access protocol, the
spatial density of throughput (SDT), which depends on channel access
probability and coverage rate, is derived as the performance objective.
Leveraging spatial statistics of the network, a throughput-utility maximization
problem is formulated to seek AP association and PCS threshold selection
policies that jointly maximize SDT. The AP association and the PCS threshold
selection policies are derived analytically while an algorithm is proposed for
numerical solution. Under simulated scenarios involving full-duplex (FD) nodes,
optimizing AP association yields performance gains for low to high node density
in large-scale wireless networks. Considering PCS threshold selection
optimization jointly with AP association is shown to improve performance by
effectively separating concurrent transmissions in space. It is shown that AP
association in FD WLANs groups users into minimal contention domains and PCS
threshold optimization reduces the interference domain of user groups for
additional performance gains.
