Adaptive power ranges and associations for self-healing in multiple types of Wi-Fi networks

Wi-Fi wireless communication has become a basic service in public areas. However, the quality of service (QoS) might be inadequate in some areas because of the following influential factors: 1) the limited number of non-overlapping channels, 2) the interference caused by unplanned deployment and mobility, 3) the rapidly changing distribution of customers, and 4) access point (AP) failures. These factors result in non-uniform network traffic distribution and unavailability of service in some areas. Hence, this study focused on addressing the problems of AP failure and interference. We propose a self-healing algorithm to provide seamless and reliable service despite AP failures. The proposed water ripple algorithm maximizes the minimum delay difference, which is defined as the difference between transmission delay and tolerable delay, to satisfy requirements of multiple users simultaneously. Variable transmission power ranges (which involve cell breathing method types) and association management are adjusted to minimize the number of out-of-service mobile devices (MDs). Thus, fair allocation of resources to users and adequate QoS are satisfied.