Bandwidth Management in Shared WLAN

In order to reduce cost and administration task, it is desirable for operators to share their WLAN infrastructure (W. Zhuang et al., 2003). In this paper, we focus on bandwidth management in shared WLANs. We propose an algorithm to allocate cell bandwidth to different operators in such a way that the traffic from one logical network can not affect throughput of the users from other ones. Due to its simplicity, this algorithm can be implemented in large WLANs that use Wi-Fi switches for ease of deployment and management of the network. We evaluated the performance of the proposed method by simulating the transmission of FTP and HTTP traffics. The results show that this method has an acceptable performance.