Capacity analysis of densely deployed wireless LANs

Wireless LANs (WLANs) based on the IEEE 802.11 standard have become an integral part of today’s indoor wireless communication infrastructure. As WLAN deployments become more prevalent and densely deployed, the nodes in these WLANs start to create congestion and interference with each other. This congestion and interference fundamentally limits the performance of these coexisting WLANs. We analyze the capacity limits of such densely deployed WLANs. We begin our analysis by investigating the suitability of the attributes of WLANs, namely their cooperative operation based on locally available information, for indoor high-capacity wireless access provisioning. We compare the cooperative class of wireless systems with another class of systems whose users behave selfishly. Following this qualitative assessment, we perform a detailed, qualitative analysis of the capacity of densely deployed WLANs in terms of a number of key environmental and operational parameters. The indoor propagation environment has a significant influence on the congestion and interference that these coexisting WLANs exert on each other. Therefore we investigate the impact of propagation environment on the aggregate throughput of densely deployed WLANs. As WLANs are deployed in close proximity of each other, the transmissions in one WLAN start to influence the outcome of transmissions in other WLANs. The manner in which the access points are deployed, and the manner in which stations associate themselves with the available access points around themselves is shown to be an influential factor in the performance of these coexisting WLANs. Therefore, we investigate the impact of random versus planned access point deployment on performance of densely deployed WLANs. Similarly, we investigate the impact of stations associating with the access point with the strongest signal or with another sufficiently strong access point in their vicinity. Furthermore, we investigate the throughput of densely deployed WLANs when operating with bounded delay. More specifically we examine the case when the input traffic arriving at the transmitters are expected to reach their destination within a certain time period, thus the transmit queues cannot grow without bounded and the system should operate at a stable point. The indoor propagation environment, creates complex interference relationships between nodes in coexisting WLANs.These complex interference relationships are compounded by the node interactions dictate