On Self-coordination in Wireless Community Networks

Co-channel interference and contention at shared medium access may significantly degrade the performance of a CSMA/CA-based wireless LAN. While this phenomenon may be controlled within a single administrative domain by choosing appropriate access point installation sites and assigning operating channels intelligently, there is little that can be done against interference by access points from other nearby administrative domains. This problem becomes paramount in so-called wireless community networks, as each access point is operated by a different owner and can be viewed as a separate domain. In this paper we propose a distributed algorithm and protocol for self-coordination of access points from different domains based solely on knowledge about the immediate neighborhood. We show that our distributed coordination algorithm may lower contention by around 19% compared to standard WLAN.