An Opportunistic Scheduler for Dense WLANs

Abstract

The demand for bandwidth by multimedia applications remains unabated. This is particular critical given the growing number of devices with WiFi capability, and the ubiquity of Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). These trends have spurred researchers to develop low-cost and backward compatible solutions to increase the capacity of WLANs. One approach is to deploy additional Access Points (APs), and strategies to manage channel, user, and transmit power. As a result, stations are likely to be near one or more APs, and therefore are more likely to experience high data rates. In this paper, we take advantage of this fact to increase the capacity of a dense WLAN further by transmitting packets to a station via a neighboring AP if its associated AP is occupied by another station. Our approach is novel as prior works have not exploited the density and diversity of APs when scheduling downstream traffic. From extensive simulation studies, we show its viability in varying traffic scenarios, and in particular, WLANs with a high number of APs.s.