Distributed channel selection scheme based on the number of interfering stations in WLAN

In contention-based wireless local area networks (WLAN), adjacent WLAN access points (APs) and stations (STAs) using the same channel may degrade their performance due to contention. To solve this problem, researchers have studied various distributed channel selection schemes, where APs select the least congested channel among all available channels. However, the existing distributed channel selection schemes rarely consider contention from upstream transmission of STAs. Therefore, it is difficult to find the least congested channel in a WLAN environment where both upstream and downstream transmissions exist. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed channel selection scheme which decides a channel with minimum number of interfering STAs as the least congested channel. Unlike the existing schemes, the proposed scheme considers the contention from both downstream and upstream transmissions. In the proposed scheme, an AP can perceive the number of interfering STAs by receiving the beacon frames from its neighboring APs. For practical implementation of our proposed scheme, we also define the additional information elements of the beacon frame according to the IEEE 802.11 standard. By performing a system level simulation and experiment using a test bed, we evaluate and analyze the performance of the proposed scheme by comparing it with that of the least congested channel selection (LCCS) and the client-assisted channel assignment optimization (CACAO) schemes. The simulation result shows that the proposed scheme increases the network throughput by 11% and 20% compared to the LCCS and CACAO schemes, respectively. Under test environment, we confirm that the proposed scheme can enhance the data rate of AP up to three times comparing to that of the LCCS scheme.