Abstract
The popularity of Wi-Fi-enabled devices alongside the growing demand for non-licensed spectrum, has made the Wi-Fi networks exceedingly congested. This endangers the efficiency of Wi-Fi and negatively affect the users' experience. The problem is especially pressing in dense areas (e.g. shopping centers) where Wi-Fi channel assignment is more likely to be uncoordinated and the working environment of Wi-Fi Access Points (APs) has become increasingly time-variant. As a result, the availability of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and network virtualization technologies has motivated the use of centralized resource management as a solution. This paper provides an algorithm for channel assignment functionality in the context of SDN-based centralized resource management, which captures the live status of a Wi-Fi network and is capable of optimising the Radio Frequency (RF) channel assignment process. The APs' network arrangement, the current assignment of the channels and the characteristics of the RF channels in IEEE 802.11 have all been taken into account in the proposed model. The performance of the proposed model in terms of the level of the interference, the spectral efficiency at each AP and the Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio (SINR) at the user-side is evaluated through simulation and compared against state of the art solutions.
Highlights
The last few years have witnessed a massive increase in the popularity of portable devices, such as smartphones and tablets thanks to their functionality, user-friendly interface, and affordable price
To evaluate the proposed channel assignment algorithm, we use MATLAB to simulate a dense Wi-Fi environment that consist of 50 Access Points (APs) randomly deployed in an area of 1200m×1200m at a minimum distance of 100 meters from each other, and the transmit power varying from 10dBm to 25dBm
We compare the performance of our SoftwareDefined Networking (SDN)-based channel assignment algorithm against two common approaches, namely: Least Congested Channel (LCC) selection mechanism and uncoordinated channel assignment
Summary
The last few years have witnessed a massive increase in the popularity of portable devices, such as smartphones and tablets thanks to their functionality, user-friendly interface, and affordable price This situation has created a growing demand on the wireless spectrum in general, but WiFi. Due to its utilization of non-licensed frequency bands, Wi-Fi is facing significant spectrum efficiency issues especially in dense areas such as apartment blocks, and shopping malls where neighboring Wi-Fi Access Points (APs) interfere with each other while competing for the spectrum. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) [7] has emerged as an efficient and flexible alternative for data network management including wireless local area networks (WLANs) Frameworks such as OpenSDWN [8], EmPOWER [9], and Odin [10] have been developed according to the SDN concept allowing operators to centralize the network management operations at a single entity, often referred to as a Controller.
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