Borrowed Channel Relaying: A Novel Method to Improve Infrastructure Network Throughput

From a networking perspective, the chief impediment to throughput enhancement in infrastructure networks such as IEEE802.11 is the access point bottleneck: all traffic to, through, and from the network has to pass through this access point. When some clients experience poor channel conditions and therefore communicate at a lower data rate, this severely impacts the throughput of all clients in the network. Recently, multihop relaying in combination with leveraging multiple data rates was proposed to alleviate this problem. However, our experiments indicate that gains from these techniques are very small with realistic positioning of clients. Instead, we propose a novel scheme that combines relaying and multiple data rate capabilities with the concept of channel borrowing. Our protocol, BCR (Borrowed Channel Relaying), utilizes unused capacity from neighboring access points and is able to achieve network throughput gains of 20% to 60% depending on the scenario. Although we use 802.11 style networks to illustrate this concept, this general principle can be applied to any infrastructure network with receivers capable of tuning to more than one channel.