3rd International ICST Conference on Quality of Service in Heterogeneous Wired/Wireless Networks

Research Article

Improve transmission reliability with multi-AP diversity in wireless networks: architecture and performance analysis

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1145/1185373.1185418,
        author={Yanfeng  Zhu and Qian  Zhang and Zhisheng  Niu and Jing  Zhu},
        title={Improve transmission reliability with multi-AP diversity in wireless networks: architecture and performance analysis},
        proceedings={3rd International ICST Conference on Quality of Service in Heterogeneous Wired/Wireless Networks},
        publisher={ACM},
        proceedings_a={QSHINE},
        year={2006},
        month={8},
        keywords={},
        doi={10.1145/1185373.1185418}
    }
    
  • Yanfeng Zhu
    Qian Zhang
    Zhisheng Niu
    Jing Zhu
    Year: 2006
    Improve transmission reliability with multi-AP diversity in wireless networks: architecture and performance analysis
    QSHINE
    ACM
    DOI: 10.1145/1185373.1185418
Yanfeng Zhu1,*, Qian Zhang2,*, Zhisheng Niu3,*, Jing Zhu4,*
  • 1: Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua, University Beijing China
  • 2: Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
  • 3: Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University Beijing China
  • 4: Communication Technology Lab Intel Corporation Hillsboro, OR 97124, U.S.A.
*Contact email: zhuyf03@mails.thu.edu.cn, qianzh@cs.ust.hk, niuzhs@tsinghua.edu.cn, jing.z.zhu@intel.com

Abstract

With the increasing development of IEEE 802.11 based Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) devices, large-scale WLANs with high dense deployment of user terminals and access points (APs) have emerged widely in various hotspots. Enhancing transmission reliability has been a primary challenge for scaling the WLANs because high dense deployment of user terminals and APs results in too many collisions. In this paper, we investigate the defects of single association mechanism defined in IEEE 802.11 on transmission reliability from network perspective. Then, we propose a multi-AP architecture, with which an AP Controller (AC) is employed to enable each user terminal to associate and cooperate with multiple APs. In this way, the user terminals can benefit from the diversity effect of multi-paths with independent collisions and transmission errors. This paper concentrates on the performance comparison between the proposed multi-AP architecture and that in IEEE 802.11 standard. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed mechanism can obtain much better performance in terms of the throughput per user and the total throughput, and the performance gain is position dependent. Moreover, the unfairness issue in traditional WLANs due to capture effect can be alleviated properly in the multi-AP framework.