Effects of Implementing Adaptable Channelization in Wi-Fi Networks

Abstract

The unprecedented increase of wireless devices is now facing a serious threat of spectrum scarcity. The situation becomes even worse due to inefficient frequency distribution protocols, deployed in trivial Wi-Fi networks. The primary source of this inefficiency is static channelization used in wireless networks. In this work, we investigate the use of dynamic and flexible channelization, for optimal spectrum utilization in Wi-Fi networks. We propose optimal spectrum sharing algorithm (OSSA) and analyze its effect on exhaustive list of essential network performance measuring parameters. The elementary concept of the proposed algorithm lies in the fact that frequency spectrum should be assigned to any access point (AP) based on its current requirement. The OSSA algorithm assigns channels with high granularity, thus maximizing spectrum utilization by more than 20% as compared to static width channel allocation. This optimum spectrum utilization, in turn, increases throughput by almost 30% in many deployment scenarios. The achieved results depict considerable decrease in interference, while simultaneously increasing range. Similarly signal strength values at relatively longer distances improve significantly at narrower channel widths while simultaneously decreasing bit error rates. We found that almost 25% reduction in interference is possible in certain scenarios through proposed algorithm.