An Extension of Active Access-Point Configuration Algorithm to IEEE 802.11n and 11ac Dual Interfaces in Wireless Local-Area Network

Abstract

Nowadays, wireless local-area networks (WLANs) have been densely deployed in a lot of fields by different providers around the world due to license-free features. To improve the network performance under such environments, we have studied the active AP configuration algorithm of optimizing the active access points (APs) along with host associations and channel assignments. Unfortunately, it limits the APs adopting one network interface of the IEEE 802.11n protocol working at 2.4GHz. Recently, the 11ac protocol at 5GHz has also become common, which allows the dual interfaces using different frequencies to increase the transmission capacity of an AP. In this paper, we extend the AP configuration algorithm to consider dual interfaces of 11n and 11ac at the APs in WLAN. In addition to selecting the active APs, their assigned channels, and associated hosts, the network interface is assigned to each host. The two throughput estimation models are adopted to consider the throughput differences of the two protocols. For evaluating the proposal, we compare the number of active APs and throughput performances against the conventional case using one interface through simulations using the WIMNET simulator and throughput measurements using the testbed system that adopts Raspberry Pi 4B for APs. The results confirm that the proposal can reduce the number of active APs while increasing the total throughput.