A dynamic radio channel allocation scheme for wireless LANs

With the increased deployment of wireless local area networks (WLAN) in many popular locations with multiple access points (AP), the limited number of usable radio channels provided by the IEEE 802.11 standard has resulted in a worse than expected network performance, such as very low throughput. The existing static radio channel allocation (RCA) schemes can only partially solve the problem in the initial planning of APs, but cannot adapt to environment changes and dynamic traffic conditions afterwards. We propose a new dynamic RCA scheme that aims to improve network performance by explicitly minimizing the cochannel interference among the neighboring APs that share a radio channel. Simulation results have demonstrated that the proposed scheme has not only significantly increased the overall network throughput, but also greatly reduced the cochannel interference among the APs