A High Density (HD) Indoor Multi-Radio WLAN Testbed

UWEETR-2006-0019

Author(s):
R. Gupta, H. Kim, T. Shing, S. Roy, J. Zhu, Y. Liu, J. Wu

Keywords:
802.11 Network performance, Physical carrier sense, Clear channel assessment, Receiving Sensitivity, Spatial reuse

Abstract

The growing adoption of 802.11 networks in the enterprise segment has led to the emergence of High Density (HD) WLAN scenarios where large (100-1000) numbers of clients are serviced by 10-100s of APs in a multi-cell environment. This leads to an interference limited environment due to limited spectrum availability; hence network design for throughput scalability becomes the primary design challenge. Broadly speaking, we espouse adaptive tuning of 802.11 PHY/MAC parameters such as receiver sensitivity, clear channel assessment (CCA) threshold and link rates to improve network throughput for any network topology, traffic and interference conditions. This work seeks to corroborate, via measurements on an experimental multi-radio tested, an algorithm for CCA threshold adaptation based on our earlier work.

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