Combined Power Control and Partially Overlapping Channel Assignment for Interference Mitigation in Dense WLAN
Babul P. Tewari, Sasthi C. Ghosh · 2017
Multiple overlapping transmissions cause a serious performance degradation in dense wireless local area network (WLAN) due to increased level of interferences. The issue of interference management becomes extremely challenging particularly for IEEE 802.11 b and g standards where the number of non-overlapping channels (NOCs) is only 3. Power control at the access points (APs) plays a major role to interference management as it determines the transmission radii of the APs. But inappropriate determination of transmission power may put several users out of the coverage range. Efficient use of partially overlapping channels (POC) may lead to increased frequency reuse as it reduces the interference range. But excessive use of POCs may cause reduced quality of service (QoS) due to increased adjacent channel interferences. In this paper we propose an effective power control and POC assignment algorithm that jointly considers power tuning and POC assignment along with NOC to maximize the network performance. Through extensive simulation the performance of the algorithm is evaluated to establish the importance of considering these two factors jointly. Furthermore it has been shown that the proposed approach outperforms some existing approaches.