Dynamic Channel Assignment in Wireless LANs

A traffic-aware and client-aware algorithm for dynamically assigning channels to access points (APs) in wireless local access networks (WLANs) is proposed. Traffic loads and received signal strength (RSS) values are used to characterize interference. The problem of selecting channels to minimize total interference then reduces to the Max k-Cut problem, which we efficiently solve with semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation. Testbed experiments demonstrate that our traffic-aware algorithm can significantly improve the quality of a channel assignment in terms of total network throughput and channel utilization. Under a randomly generated continuous traffic distribution, throughput gains of 40% on average over static channel assignment are observed.