The Third IEEE Workshop on Wireless Local Area Networks

IEEE 802.11a and ETSI BRAN HiperLAN/2 are evolving standards for Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). Radio systems of these types will operate at the unlicensed 5GHz bands. When these radio systems operate at the same radio channel in the neighborhood, they will mutually interfere with each other. Data throughput, quality of service levels, and availability will be degraded and unpredictable if the different radio systems are not able to coordinate the competing access to radio resources. We discuss a solution for interworking, i.e., communication between 802.11a and HiperLAN/2 and policybased approaches to achieve fair spectrum sharing. By combining the two protocols of IEEE 802.11a and ETSI BRAN HiperLAN/2 we look at ways to achieve co-existence, interworking, and discuss the potentials of our new hybrid approach for the application of multi-hop networks. Index Terms — ETSI BRAN HiperLAN/2, IEEE 802.11a, Interworking, Co-existence, MultiHop, Game Theory