On channel assignment, distributed antennas and network load distribution in dense IEEE 802.11 infrastructure networks

During the last few years, there has been a tremendous increase in the deployment of IEEE 802.11 wireless networks. However, a possible drawback is the proliferation of dense WiFi deployments leading to mutual interference among WiFi nodes were users will experience low QoS levels. The contribution of this work is to present an architecture for dense WiFi networks that combines Rf channel assignment, distributed antennas and network load distribution to enhance QoS. Simulation results showed that channel assignment and distributed antenna are complementary. The former one increases the capacity of the network by adding additional spectrum and decreasing co-channel interference. The latter one helps to decrease the packet error rate especially of weak links, which also results in higher network capacity. In addition, by balancing the network load among several Access Points the capacity of the uplink of the wired broadband connection (e.g. DSL) can be more efficiently utilized. Simulations show that the proposed method increases the average throughput by up to 14% in infrastructure networks where the wireless capacity is the limiting factor. In scenarios where the backbone is the limiting factor, the average throughput can be increased by up to 56% by using distributed antennas and network load distribution.