Load-aware spectrum distribution in Wireless LANs

  • Authors:
  • Affiliations:
  • Venue:
  • ICNP '08 Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Traditionally, the channelization structure in IEEE 802.11-based wireless LANs has been fixed: Each access point (AP) is assigned one channel and all channels are equally wide. In contrast, it has recently been shown that even on commodity hardware, the channel-width can be adapted dynamically purely in software. Leveraging this capability, we study the use of dynamic-width channels, where every AP adaptively adjusts not only its center-frequency, but also its channel-width to match its traffic load. This gives raise to a novel optimization problem that differs from previously studied channel assignment problems. We propose efficient spectrum-distribution algorithms and evaluate their effectiveness through analysis and simulations using real-world traces. Our results indicate that by allocating more spectrum to highly-loaded APs, the overall spectrum-utilization can be substantially improved and the notorious load-balancing problem in WLANs can be solved naturally.