Inter-AP coordination for fair throughput in infrastructure-based IEEE 802.11 mesh networks

Abstract

This paper studies throughput fairness among different basic service sets (BSSs) in infrastructure-based IEEE 802.11 mesh networks, where inter-BSS interference is unavoidable because of the difficulty in frequency and coverage planning and the limited number of non-overlapping frequency channels available for IEEE 802.11 networks. A distributed inter-access points (APs) coordination scheme is proposed for achieving fair throughput among the BSSs sharing the same frequency channel. In this scheme, throughput information of the BSSs is exchanged among the APs periodically. Based on this, each AP dynamically controls transmission activities of the mobile stations (MSs) in its own BSS coverage area as well as the interference level to other BSSs. An analytical model is developed for throughput of the BSSs in a mesh environment, and an optimized solution is obtained for achieving throughput fairness among BSSs. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme can achieve fair throughput among BSSs under different network conditions and the achieved throughput values are close to the optimum ones.