Distributed channel management in uncoordinated wireless environments

Wireless 802.11 hotspots have grown in an uncoordinated fashion with highly variable deployment densities. Such uncoordinated deployments, coupled with the difficulty of implementing coordination protocols, has often led to conflicting configurations (e.g., in choice of transmission power and channel of operation) among the corresponding Access Points (APs). Overall, such conflicts cause both unpredictable network performance and unfairness among clients of neighboring hotspots. In this paper, we focus on the fairness problem for uncoordinated deployments. We study this problem from the channel assignment perspective. Our solution is based on the notion of channel-hopping, and meets all the important design considerations for control methods in uncoordinated deployments — distributed in nature, minimal to zero coordination among APs belonging to different hotspots, simple to implement, and interoperable with existing standards. In particular, we propose a specific algorithm cal...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: MOBICOM
• Authors: Arunesh Mishra, Vivek Shrivastava, Dheeraj Agrawal, Suman Banerjee, Samrat Ganguly
• Keywords: Channel Assignment, MOBICOM 2006, Such Uncoordinated Deployments, Uncoordinated Deployments