A distributed-and-interactive reporting scheme for collective-sensing in multi-band wireless LAN system

Multi-band wireless local area network (WLAN) allows WLAN to adaptively select and jointly use wireless channels in multiple frequency bands to improve spectral efficiency. Monitoring of multi-band wireless resources is a significant and challenging issue for multi-band WLAN. Traditional methods of sensing by access point (AP) for each basic service set (BSS) of multi-cell WLAN incurs constraints of sensing capacity as well as the spatial and spectral coverage, especially for multi-band WLAN. We consider a resource monitoring system that employs collective sensing for each BSS via multi-RF stations (STAs). Distributed and collective sensing at each BSS alleviates the constraints of AP based sensing. Meanwhile, the STA based sensing for a BSS leads to a large sensing-report overhead. In this paper, we especially address the problem of potential large spectrum consumption caused by the sensing reports from a collective of sensing entities of STAs in multi-band WLAN. We propose a distributed-and-interactive scheme to efficiently report sensing results, such as channel occupancy ratio (COR) from sensing entities. The sensing results are collected at the AP in each BSS in a WLAN. The evaluation results show that the proposed scheme leads to a very small number of reports to obtain the necessary sensing results, even for a WLAN that has a large number of sensing entities.