Beacon flooding problem in high-density WLANs
Hyunjoong Lee, Saewoong Bahk · 2017
With the rapid growth of smart devices such as smartphones, tablets, and laptops, traffic demands in IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs) has been increased exponentially. To meet the demand, in recent years, numerous access points (APs) have been deployed in many places such as residential areas, shopping malls, airports, office and campus buildings. As the density of 802.11 WLAN increases, clients often experience significant performance degradation due to the interference from other basic service sets (BSSs). In this paper, we focus on investigating the impact of beacon frames transmitted by adjacent APs on the network performance. Through measurement results, we confirm the periodic beacon transmissions from neighboring APs occupies a large portion of the air-time in the medium, thus degrading throughput performance of associated clients. In addition, via ns-3 simulations, we further verified the beacon flooding problem is especially severe in good channel conditions.