Channel Bonding in Short-Range WLANs

Channel bonding is one of the strategies considered in the IEEE 802.11ac amendment to improve the performance of Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). However, besides the obvious gains attainable from using wider channels in terms of higher achievable transmission rates, there are also several potential drawbacks that may seriously compromise the overall WLAN performance, most notably the higher probability to suffer from external interference. The goal of this paper is to assess the suitability of channel bonding for enhancing the performance of short-range WLANs, which are highly susceptible to external interference. We analytically model and evaluate the performance of the two channel access schemes proposed for the IEEE 802.11ac amendment that enable the use of channel bonding. The results show that for short-range WLANs, the use of channel bonding is able to provide a significant performance boost when the presence of external interference is low to moderate, specially if the dynamic bandwidth channel access scheme is enabled.