Adaptive channel selection control saving its redundant usage based on hidden stations in wireless access networks
Yosuke Tanigawa, Shintaro Matsuda, Hideki Tode · 2012
Recently, wireless networks are utilized in various situations. However, the characteristic of wireless environment causes many problems like limited bandwidth, collisions and interferences among transferred frames. It is required to enhance bandwidth with efficient channel utilization. In this paper, in wireless access networks where a base station and wireless stations communicate directly, we achieve higher network bandwidth by introducing multi-channel environment and utilizing each channel efficiently. Though wireless networking with multiple channels is well explored, the most of the related works focus on wireless multihop networks. However, the topology of wireless access networks we assume is completely different from multihop networks. Hence, a new multi-channel protocol, with different architecture and algorithm, is required to increase network bandwidth. In this paper, we propose a new protocol suited to the target environment. Specifically, the proposed method controls operation channel of each wireless station to minimize collisions and interferences caused by hidden station problem, and to balance data transfer load on every channel. Moreover, the proposed method minimizes the number of utilized channels by suppressing redundant usage of channels according to total data transfer load. This alleviates channel interferences among neighboring wireless access networks and restricts power consumption at base station. Finally, we show the effectiveness of the proposed method by computer simulation.