Joint association and power adaption in WiFi community networks

Traditional WiFi community networks are uncoordinated and provide ubiquitous wireless access to all mobile stations (STAs) by sharing wireless bandwidth. However, in such unplanned wireless environments, once there is a new arrival of STA or access point (AP), the steady state of the network would break, which results in the increase of the interference and the decrease of the network throughput. To overcome the aforementioned problems, we propose a distributed joint association and power adaption scheme to maximize the throughput of entire network. First, we define different utility functions for STAs, APs, and the network, which can reflect users satisfactory to their throughput. Then, each STA selects candidates from their neighboring APs based on the estimated utility. Meanwhile, the APs adaptively adjust power to maximize their utility or to minimize the interference with their neighbors according to the change of the network. To validate the performance of our proposed scheme, we consider different network conditions, and simulation results show that the average utility of the network using our scheme can greatly increase throughput than the existing work.