A dynamic and autonomous channel selection strategy for interference avoidance in 802.11

The coexistence of different technologies within the same spectrum swaths, as well as the distributed, non-coordinated channel assignment for WLANs is becoming not only an important research topic, but also a matter of sustainability for the trend we witness in moving all last-hop communications on wireless links to unleash the users from their wires and tethers. This work proposes, implements and evaluates a strategy that allows an entire 802.11 Basic Service Set (BSS) to dynamically hop between the available channels always selecting the “best” one. The selection not only guarantees the hopping BSS performances well above what can be achieved with a static selection, but it also minimizes the interference toward other BSSs, so that the overall performance of the system maximizes resource utilization. The performance of the protocol and strategy we propose is tested with an implementation on off-the-shelf 802.11g cards; the experiments are run in labs and around the campus of the University of Trento.