Study on Access Point and Bandwidth Management in Overcrowded WLANs by Matching Algorithm and Game Theory

Abstract

Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) have been widely developed during this decade, due to their mobility and flexibility. As WLANs have become popular in many sectors, so we have to manage it efficiently. In a typical deployment of WLANs, the coverage areas of nearby access-points(APs) usually overlap with one another and a host may detect signals from multiple APs which degrade the network performance. The main purpose of our work to minimize the number of active APs in a overcrowded WLAS and to develop a bandwidth sharing techniques to reduce the wastage of bandwidth. This study represents the management of APs in overcrowded WLANs. In this thesis, firstly, we analyze the relationship of number of access point (AP) and achieved throughput for a given scenario. In the scenario we consider a number of parameters, i.e. given area, topology, number of users, expected rate and channel allocation vector. We find that in general with the increase of AP the performance of overall network improve. However after a certain number of deployed APs, further increase of AP does not bring substantial improvement in the network performance. More specially, performance deteriorates after a threshold value of number of APs due to increasing interference between adjacent channel (or co-channel) interference. We verify the throughput increasing rate with proper management of APs by simulation results using WIMNET (Wireless Internet-access Mesh Network) simulator. Most of the cases we see that in an overcrowded WLAN, the host does not get their expected bandwidth. By using an effective bandwidth sharing techniques, this problem can be solved. In this research work, we‟ve also proposed about the bandwidth sharing techniques for a given scenario where the different operators can share their bandwidth with each other by applying matching algorithm and game theory model.