On the Use of Wide Channels in WiFi Networks

An increased density of access points is common today in WiFi deployments, and more and more parameters need to be configured in such networks. In this paper, we question current industrial guidelines for both residential and enterprise scenarios. More precisely, we investigate the joint channel, power, and carrier sense threshold allocation problem in IEEE 802.11ac networks, showing that the current practice, which is to use narrower channels at maximum power when the deployment is dense, yields much worse performance than a solution using the widest possible channel with a much lower power.