A Client-Assisted and Distributed Channel Assignment Scheme For Dense IEEE 802.11 WLAN

Due to huge popularity, the WLANs (Wireless Local Area Networks) have gained in recent years, especially based on IEEE 802.11 family of standards, dense deployment of AP (Access Point) can be found in many places. However, these dense deployments can severely affect the aggregate throughput of the network due increased contention and interference between different APs using same channel. This often leads to decreased overall throughput of a local wireless network, such as in a university campus or city-wide Wi-Fi network. In this paper, a simple client-assisted and distributed channel assignment scheme has been proposed for minimizing such adverse affects of interference in dense WLANs. Client-assisted means the resources of clients are also used for measurements of some parameters to increase the performance of the scheme. Distributed schemes are those schemes which can easily be used where AP belongs to different owners and administrative domains. This scheme will be shown to have better throughput performance than other prominent distributed schemes through simulation results.