Access Selection in Partially Backhaul-Limited Multi-Operator IEEE 802.11 Networks

Radio resource management (RRM) across multiple, potentially competing, wireless networks has emerged as a salient feature for future generation system. Besides increased overhead, it will incur more complicated architectures and the question then becomes whether the gains of cooperative RRM (increased throughput, reliability, etc.) can justify these disadvantages. Herein we study potential gains that can be achieved by utilizing sophisticated algorithms in a scenario with two cooperating IEEE 802.11a networks, limited by either the wireless or wired link. Both best-effort (BE) and minimum bit-rate (MBR) are treated and throughout the paper we use the rudimentary minimum path-loss (MPL) allocation as reference. Our results indicate that sophisticated access selection methods that besides path-loss, also account for AP load and potential constraints in the wired connection, can increase performance significantly. The maximum gain varies between 30-60% and 100-150% for BE and MBR traffic respectively and is typically obtained when there, on average, is one user per AP. We also studied the case where APs with constrained wired capacity connected (using the MPL criteria) to high-capacity APs in order to reroute traffic. Contrary to the approach in which advanced allocation principles is used, "loose" network integration is sufficient and even though it gave lower gains for BE data, the achievable rates for MBR data could be improved substantially