Multi-AP Coordination with Centralized Overlay Time-Sliced Scheduling in WiFi Network

Our work explores the efficacy of time-slicing and a centralized scheduler for performance enhancement in IEEE 802.11 networks. Our framework takes over control from the WiFi access points (APs) by queuing packets at the central scheduler, before the APs, and releasing packets efficiently for selected sets of STAs in appropriate time slices. We propose ‘index’ based proportional fair scheduling for interference mitigation in dense WiFi deployments. The framework results in near optimal utility of the wireless network, without explicit knowledge of complete network graph and without on-line RSSI measurements, achieving over-all coordination among the APs. We carried out extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of our framework with both TCP & interactive real-time traffic. Our work holds significant potential for addressing the challenges posed by dense deployment of WiFi networks.