Enhancements of minimax access-point setup optimisation approach for IEEE 802.11 WLAN

Abstract

As a flexible and cost-efficient internet access network, the IEEE 802.11 wireless local-area network (WLAN) has been broadly deployed around the world. Previously, to improve the IEEE 802.11n WLAN performance, we proposed the four-step minimax access-point (AP) setup optimisation approach: 1) link throughputs between the AP and hosts in the network field are measured manually; 2) the throughput estimation model is tuned using the measurement results; 3) the bottleneck host suffering the least throughput is estimated using this model; 4) the AP setup is optimised to maximise the throughput of the bottleneck host. Unfortunately, this approach has drawbacks: 1) a lot of manual throughput measurements are necessary to tune the model; 2) the shift of the AP location is not considered; 3) IEEE 802.11ac devices at 5 GHz are not evaluated, although they can offer faster transmissions. In this paper, we present the three enhancements: 1) the number of measurement points is reduced while keeping the model accuracy; 2) the coordinate of the AP setup is newly adopted as the optimisation parameter; 3) the AP device with IEEE 802.11ac at 5 GHz is considered with slight modifications. The effectiveness is confirmed by extensive experiments in three network fields.