Network controlled frequency channel and bandwidth allocation scheme for IEEE 802.11a/n/ac wireless LANs: RATOP

Abstract

The first giga-bit class wireless local area network (wireless LAN) below 6 GHz frequency (the IEEE 802.11ac standard) is attracting attention due to its capability of handling much more of the rapidly growing data traffic. The increased density of wireless LAN access points (APs), however, has induced inter-cell interference that severely degrades system performance. This problem seems to be getting worse with the increase of 802.11n- and 802.11ac-based APs, which establish basic service sets (BSSs) with wider channel bandwidths. In order to mitigate this problem, we propose an efficient radio resource allocation scheme called RATOP that can be applied to a managed wireless LAN system with a central coordinator. On the basis of channel monitoring results, capability, and data traffic information obtained from APs, the central coordinator computes the quasioptimal frequency channel and channel bandwidth of each AP in such a way that the given utility function is maximized. Numerous simulations with UDP traffic flows on the coexistence scenarios of 802.11a/n/ac show that the RATOP works well and reduces the number of overlapping BSSs by 65%-89%. As a result, the RATOP improves the minimum throughput and fairness among throughput of APs even when there exist foreign APs of other network domains that cannot be controlled by the coordinator.