Cooperative radio resource management mechanisms based on autonomous session establishment between APs in IEEE 802.11 WLAN

Recently, WLAN access points (APs) are being widely installed by end users, since they can be easily installed and cost-effectively provide high-speed wireless access. However, the indiscreet deployments of WLAN APs without consideration of surrounding environments cause degradation of WLAN performance by introducing heavy contentions for medium access and high signal interferences. In order to improve the performance of WLANs arbitrarily deployed by end users, autonomous radio resource management (RRM) should be performed. For the demand, we propose a session setup mechanism which supports autonomous neighboring AP discovery and establishment of RRM sessions between adjacent APs. In addition, we introduce cooperative RRM techniques which can efficiently use the limited wireless resources by managing operating channels of APs and access of mobile nodes. Based on test-bed implementation, we evaluate feasibility and performance of the proposed schemes, and confirm that the proposed schemes can be utilized for efficient management of WLANs.