Power Control in WLANs for Optimization of Social Fairness

Wide deployment of wireless local area networks (WLANs), especially in modern densely-populated metropolitan areas, constitutes a leap towards ubiquitous wireless network access. This is largely attributable to their low installation and operational cost and mainly their operation in unlicensed bands. Together with the clear benefits of increased WLAN coverage though, new challenges have emerged; dense WLAN deployments lead to significant interference among neighbor networks, making its mitigation a matter of crucial importance for their performance. To this end, transmission power control is a natural choice to limit interference. In this paper, we propose and evaluate two algorithms (FirstMax and BestMax) for WLAN Access Points (APs) to cooperatively control their transmission power levels, leading to more fair and more efficient spectrum usage. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed algorithms (and especially BestMax) are far more profitable and fair choices than transmitting at the maximum feasible power. Consequently, an optimization of the social fairness can be achieved.