On using grid of collocated APs to improve performance of wireless VoD systems

In previous work we showed that Collocated Wireless Access Points coupled with appropriate management of their non-overlapping channels could be used for building Scalable Wireless Video-On-Demand (SWVoD) systems within a limited covered area. In this paper, we introduce the Grid of collocated Access Points or simply GAPS, a novel approach that uses clusters of Collocated Access Points as the basic blocks to efficiently build SWVoD systems for a wider covered area. In GAPS, each basic block is responsible for a distinct part of the covered area and the amount of APs per block can be set either statically or dynamically depending on the client concentration pattern (CCP). We present in details the framework of GAPS and report simulated performance results that indicated that GAPS could significantly decrease the blocking rate of video requests in comparison with previous design based on fixed distribution of basic blocks. In addition, GAPS had the advantage of sustaining the lower blockage rate over larger covered areas. Also, we showed that the higher setup cost of dynamic grids was fully compensated by handling changes on CCP much better than the static scheme so that GAPS could generate a higher monthly net income according to our cost metric.