Channel assignment strategies of IEEE 802.11 WLAN in a shared public hotspot environment

The demand of wireless access in anywhere and anytime drives the deployment of Wi-Fi hotspot. Multiple service providers may deploy the Wi-Fi hotspot in the same area to response to the users´ needs. Channel assignment for the access point becomes the challenging problem, especially in the situation that other service providers do not provide full cooperation. Channel assignment of APs need to be carefully determined to obtain the optimal performance. This paper proposes the channel assignment strategies of IEEE 802.11 WLAN to provide the optimum service performance among shared service providers. The series of experiment presented in this paper provides the basis of the proposed the channel assignment strategies.