An optimal channel assignment strategy for WLANs using distributed optimization

Abstract

An important design goal for wireless local area networks (WLANs) is the performance. It is well known that the major issue challenge to the performance in WLANs is the wireless interference. This leads to an ambience that depends on the channel assignments among interfering access points (AP). Due to the limited number of non-overlapping channels, severe interference scenarios may arise if an unappropriate spectrum planning is considered. In our study we considered WLANs scenarios where APs belong to different administrative domains, a common situation in dense urban deployments. In such environment the use of centralized algorithms is not appropriate and the already proposed distributed methods do no guarantee optimal channel assignment. In this paper, we formalize the channel allocation as a distributed constraint optimization problem (DCOP) and propose a new cooperative channel allocation strategy using the distributed pseudotree-optimization procedure (DPOP). The adjacent channel interference is analytically formulated for DPOP. The simulation results show that the proposed strategy always achieves the optimal solution and is scalable in terms of the number of exchanged messages.