A scalable multiagent approach for channel assignment in wireless networks
Tânia Lucia Monteiro, Marcelo Eduardo Pellenz, Edgard Jamhour, Manoel C. Penna, Fabrício Enembreck, Richard Demo Souza · 2016
The performance of IEEE 802.11-based wireless local area networks (WLANs) depends on the channel assignment among interfering access points (APs). Due to the limited number of nonoverlapping channels, severe interference scenarios may arise if no appropriated spectrum management is employed. Additionally, in dense urban areas it is usual to find wireless networks scenarios with interfering APs belonging to different administrative domains. In such cases the use of centralized algorithms is not feasible and the already proposed distributed methods present scalability problems. Our study investigates the channel allocation problem in WLANs, aiming to minimize interference and improve the network performance. In this paper, we formalize the channel allocation as a distributed constraint optimization problem (DCOP) and propose a new cooperative channel allocation strategy, called Distributed Suboptimal Channel Assignment (DSCA), which uses distributed pseudotree-optimization (DPOP). Our strategy reduces the number of messages and also the total amount of control information exchanged between APs. The results show that DSCA outperforms known techniques in terms of scalability, while keeping a good solution quality.