Summary: Self­Management in Chaotic Wireless Deployments #
Aditya Akella Glenn Judd Srinivasan Seshan Peter Steenkiste
Computer Science Department
Carnegie Mellon University
{aditya, glennj, srini+, prs}@cs.cmu.edu
Abstract
Over the past few years, wireless networking technologies have made vast forays into our daily lives. Today, one
can find 802.11 hardware and other personal wireless technology employed at homes, shopping malls, coffee shops
and airports. Present­day wireless network deployments bear two important properties: they are unplanned, with
most access points (APs) deployed by users in a spontaneous manner, resulting in highly variable AP densities; and
they are unmanaged, since manually configuring and managing a wireless network is very complicated. We refer to
such wireless deployments as being chaotic.
In this paper, we present a study of the impact of interference in chaotic 802.11 deployments on end­client perfor­
mance. First, using large­scale measurement data from several cities, we show that it is not uncommon to have tens of
APs deployed in close proximity of each other. Moreover, most APs are not configured to minimize interference with
their neighbors. We then perform trace­driven simulations to show that the performance of end­clients could suffer
significantly in chaotic deployments. We argue that end­client experience could be significantly improved by mak­
ing chaotic wireless networks self­managing. We design and evaluate automated power control and rate adaptation
algorithms to minimize interference among neighboring APs, while ensuring robust end­client performance.
keywords: dense deployment, 802.11 access points, interference, power control, channel assignment

Source: Akella, Aditya - Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin at Madison

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences