Adaptive and Distributed Radio Resource Allocation in Densely Deployed Wireless LANs: A Game-Theoretic Approach

Abstract

As increasing numbers of access points (APs) are deployed in wireless local area networks (WLANs), they experience severe channel interference. Thus, a well-defined resource management scheme for APs should be devised. Undoubtedly, a centralized and deterministic resource management is not appropriate, owing to the distributed operation and dynamic channel condition of densely deployed WLANs. To address this problem, an adaptive and distributed radio resource allocation (ADRA) algorithm is proposed, in which an optimal mixed strategy for selecting the channel width of APs is derived via a game-theoretic approach. ADRA also fits into the densely deployed WLAN in that it considers partially overlapped channels. Simulation results show that ADRA can provide a comparable throughput and fairness performance to centralized algorithms, even though it functions in a distributed manner. Moreover, it is shown that ADRA works adaptively even when network environments change rapidly.