Cooperative communication in channel assignment strategies for IEEE 802.11k WLAN systems

Realizing good system performance in IEEE 802.11 deployments requires thorough network planning, a sophisticated task, which, more often than not, requires expert knowledge. In cases where IEEE 802.11 networks operating under different administrations reside in the same geographical area (as defined by the bounds of radio signal transmission and reception), the problem of efficient radio resource allocation arises. Particularly for IEEE 802.11a/b/g systems, efficient radio resource allocation in a dense urban environment can be quite a challenge, due to the finite number of interference-free channels available. To address this shortcoming, we study the mechanisms provided by the IEEE 802.11k standard upon the performance of radio resource management strategies in WLAN type systems under a dense deployment. To this end, we present a Learning With Communication (LWC) Distributed Channel Assignment (DCA) algorithm that exploits local communication among access points to realize a rapidly converging self-organizing channel assignment scheme. We evaluate the performance of LWC DCA algorithm through simulation scenarios.