Closed Loop RF Management Algorithm for Enterprise High Density WLANs

The growing adoption of 802.11 networks in the enterprise segment has led to the emergence of High Density (HD) WLAN scenarios where large (100-1000) numbers of clients are serviced by 10-100s of APs in a multi-cell environment. This leads to an interference limited environment due to limited spectrum availability; hence network design for throughput scalability becomes the primary design challenge. Current industry practice leans towards centralized RF management of HDWLAN Enterprise deployments using a RF controller. The main focus of the work in this paper is a new CS/RT (Carrier Sense/Receiver threshold) adaptation algorithm in which APs, Clients and RF controllers participate collaboratively to mitigate the interference. Performance comparisons of the proposed CS/RT adaptation compared with current rate adaptation algorithms such as SampleRate [2] and ARF [1] are presented.