Run-time Estimation of the Number of Active Stations in IEEE 802.11 WLANs

In a dynamic wireless LAN (WLAN), an important issue is how to estimate the number of active stations (denoted by M) at run-time and in a distributed manner, which is required by dynamic radio channel allocations. In this paper, we propose a new model for the M value estimation. Then, we develop a new algorithm to estimate the M values in a WLAN by using the least square estimation (LSE) based on Gauss-Markov Theorem. The novelty of this algorithm is that the performance of the estimate does not depend on the variance of the state noise. The estimator is unbiased and has minimum variance, in addition to its prompt reactivity to the changes of network dynamics.