Cooperation among access points for enhanced quality of service in dense wireless environments

The high popularity of Wi-Fi technology for wireless access has led to a common problem of densely deployed access points (APs) in residential or commercial buildings, competing to use the same or overlapping frequency channels and causing a degradation to the user experience due to excessive interference. This degradation is partly caused by the restriction where each client device is allowed to be served only by one of a very limited set of APs (e.g. belonging to the same residential unit), even if it is within range of (or even has a better signal quality to) many other APs. In this paper, we propose a cooperative strategy to mitigate the interference and enhance the quality of service in dense wireless deployments, by having neighboring APs agree to take turns (e.g. in round-robin fashion) to serve each other´s clients. We present and analyze a cooperative game-theoretic model of the incentives involved in such cooperation and identify the conditions under which cooperation would be beneficial for the participating APs.