Adjacent channel interference aware channel assignment scheme for WLANs

As the deployment of wireless devices becomes widespread, the performance reduction due to interference between wireless channels incur a new research issue. Thus, the channel assignment scheme for reducing the interference is very important in IEEE 802.11-based Wireless LANs. However, most previous approaches have focused on 2.4GHz spectral band or have assumed that there is no interference between non-overlapping channels. In this paper, we investigate adjacent channel interference (ACI) between non-overlapping channels. We find out that the ACI has a great impact on the throughput performance via experimental results. We also propose a new channel assignment scheme which minimizes the ACI. The proposed scheme allocates the channel so as to maximize the system utilization based on the information of neighbor channel state. To evaluate the proposed scheme, we conduct extensive experiments on a wireless testbed. We also show that the proposed scheme achieves superior network performance.