Cooperative Games Among Densely Deployed WLAN Access Points

The high popularity of Wi-Fi technology for wireless access has led to a common problem of densely deployed access points (APs) in residential or commercial buildings, competing to use the same or overlapping frequency channels and causing degradation to the user experience due to excessive interference. This degradation is partly caused by the restriction where each client device is allowed to be served only by one of a very limited set of APs (e.g., belonging to the same residential unit), even if it is within the range of (or even has a better signal quality to) many other APs. The current chapter proposes a cooperative strategy to mitigate the interference and enhance the quality of service in dense wireless deployments by having neighboring APs agree to take turns (e.g., in round-robin fashion) to serve each other’s clients. We present and analyze a cooperative game-theoretic model of the incentives involved in such cooperation and identify the conditions under which cooperation would be beneficial for the participating APs.