Efficient Bonded Channel Assignment in IEEE 802.11 WLAN with Heterogeneous Clients
Babul P. Tewari, Sasthi C. Ghosh · 2015
Channel bonding allows IEEE 802.11n clients to operate at a maximum rate of 300 Mbps which can significantly improve the network throughput. But at the same time it increases the co-channel interference to the nearby APs leading to a degradation of network throughput. The issue becomes more serious when the network consists of heterogeneous clients. An inappropriate assignment of bonded channels to the APs may penalize the legacy clients served by other APs. Furthermore, activating the APs with non-bonded channels only may also penalize the n clients. In both cases the network throughput may be compromised. In this paper we propose an efficient bonded channel assignment algorithm addressing how efficiently a bonded channel can be used together with non-bonded channels to maximize the network throughput. Through extensive simulation we have shown that the proposed approach is efficient enough in terms of both network throughput and client fairness.