Measurement-Driven Guidelines for 802.11 WLAN Design

Dense deployments of WLANs suffer from increased interference and as a result, reduced capacity. There are three main functions used to improve the overall network capacity: a) intelligent frequency allocation across APs, b) load-balancing of user affiliations across APs, and c) adaptive power-control for each AP. Several algorithms have been proposed in each category, but so far, their evaluation has been limited to: (a) each approach in isolation and, (b) simulations or small-scale testbeds. In this paper, we ask the question: what is the best way to combine these different functions? Our focus is to fully explore the interdependencies between the three functions in order to understand when and how to deploy them on a network. We follow a measurement-driven study to quantify the effects of three previously proposed optimization schemes (one for each category) on a relatively large testbed and in many different scenarios. Surprisingly, we find that blindly applying all the three opti...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: TON
• Authors: Ioannis Broustis, Konstantina Papagiannaki, Srikanth V. Krishnamurthy, Michalis Faloutsos, Vivek P. Mhatre
• Keywords: Communication Networks, Network Capacity, Overall Network Capacity, TON 2010