Design and implementation of a Cluster-based Channel Assignment in high density 802.11 WLANs

IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) has become one of the most popular networking environments. With high density WLANs, it causes the interference among access points (APs) and degrades the performance of APs, especially in public area. To solve this problem, we design and implement a Cluster-based Channel Assignment (CCA), a combination of RSS-Aware Channel Selection Module (RCSM) and Interference-Aware Clustering Module (ICM), which is applied to a network management system (NMS) as a central coordinator. Based on the Received Signal Strength (RSS) information collected by NMS, RCSM can assign channels with less interference and ICM can reasonably partition interference domains of WLANs. The CCA leads to more efficient channel assignment in high density WLANs. We applied our scheme in a high density real Public WLANs, called Huashan. The results show it effectively increases the AP's throughput.