Understanding the limitations of transmit power control for indoor wlans

A wide range of transmit power control (TPC) algorithms have been proposed in recent literature to reduce interference and increase capacity in 802.11 wireless networks. However, few of them have made it to practice. In many cases this gap is attributed to lack of suitable hardware support in wireless cards to implement these algorithms. In particular, many research efforts have indicated that wireless card vendors need to support power control mechanisms in a finegrained manner – both in the number of possible power levels and the time granularity at which the controls can be applied. In this paper we claim that even if fine-grained power control mechanisms were to be made available by wireless card vendors, algorithms would not be able to properly leverage such degrees of control in typical indoor environments. We prove this claim through rigorous empirical analysis and then build a tunable empirical model (Model-TPC) that can determine the granularity of power control that is ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: IMC
• Authors: Vivek Shrivastava, Dheeraj Agrawal, Arunesh Mishra, Suman Banerjee, Tamer Nadeem
• Keywords: IMC 2007, Internet Technology, Power Control, Power Control Mechanisms, Wireless Card