Performance evaluation of mobile hotspots in densely deployed WLAN environments

This paper presents a study of mobile wireless LAN (WLAN) hotspots which are used to provide cellular-WiFi tethering service to personal devices. A dense deployment scenario for fixed and mobile WLAN is described and potential performance problems due to interference are identified. An analytical model for coexisting fixed and mobile WLAN hotspots with heterogeneous traffic is presented. The model is used to evaluate the performance of a mobile WLAN as it transits through a set of densely deployed fixed access points (APs), and performance problems due to lack of frequency coordination are identified. An adaptive channel assignment (ACA) scheme for improving mobile AP performance is proposed and evaluated. It is shown that significant performance gains can be achieved with ACA with maximum absolute and percentage throughput gains up to 1.24 Mbps and 42.8% respectively. We also show that setting the scanning interval in ACA requires consideration of the speed at which the mobile WLAN is moving in order to compensate for the throughput losses during channel scanning.