System and method of locating an interferer and mitigating its effect for stations of a wireless local area network. Embodiments provide a protocol and mechanism to evaluate the interferer location relative to a wireless link and to take accurate actions to mitigate the interference effect for specific cases. A method includes classifying a location of an interferer relative to a wireless communication device based on a comparison with a clear-channel threshold and a noise-tolerability threshold of the device, categorizing a location of the interferer relative to a wireless link based on a combination of the interference categories for the transmitting and the receiving devices, and mitigating interference in the wireless network according to the categorization. For example, in some cases, mitigating includes adapting a noise-tolerability threshold of the transmitting device to allow transmission.