| Abstract | We propose an efficient client-based approach for channel man-agement (channel assignment and load balancing) in 802.11-based
WLANs that lead to better usage of the wireless spectrum. This
approach is based on a “conflict set coloring” formulation that
jointly performs load balancing along with channel assignment.
Such a formulation has a number of advantages. First, it explicitly
captures interference effects at clients. Next, it intrinsically ex-
poses opportunities for better channel re-use. Finally, algorithms
based on this formulation do not depend on specific physical RF
models and hence can be applied efficiently to a wide-range of in-
building as well as outdoor scenarios.
We have performed extensive packet-level simulations and mea-
surements on a deployed wireless testbed of 70 APs to validate the
performance of our proposed algorithms. We show that in addi-
tion to single network scenarios, the conflict set coloring formu-
lation is well suited for channel assignment where multiple wire-
less networks share and contend for spectrum in the same physical
space. Our results over a wide range of both simulated topologies
and in-building testbed experiments indicate that our approach
improves application level performance at the clients by upto three
times (and atleast 50%) in comparison to current best-known tech-
niques.
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