On the Goodness of Using Orthogonal Channels in WLAN IEEE 802.11 in Realistic Scenarios

Abstract EN

Due to the high density of Wi-Fi networks, especially in the unlicensed 2.4 GHz frequency band, channel assignment has become a critical duty for achieving a satisfactory user experience.

Probably, the main peculiarity of Wi-Fi networks is the partial overlap of the radio channels that can be used by access points.

For that reason, a number of works avoid cochannel interferences by using only channels which are far enough from each other to have no interferences, the so-called orthogonal channels.

However, there is a range of choices between using the whole spectrum and using only orthogonal channels.

In this work we evaluate the influence of the choice of channel set in realistic settings, using both optimization and heuristic approaches.

Results show that the optimizer is not able to achieve better results when using the whole spectrum instead of restricting to only the orthogonal channels.

In fact, the optimizer uses mainly the orthogonal channels when they are available, while the heuristics considered lose performance when more channels are available.

We believe this insight will be useful to design new heuristics for Wi-Fi channel assignment.