A novel beamforming based model of coverage and transmission costing in IEEE 802.11 WLAN networks

Abstract

IEEE 802.11 WLAN indoor networks face major inherent and environmental issues such as interference, noise, and obstacles. At the same time, they must provide a maximal service performance in highly changing radio environments and conformance to various applications’ requirements. For this purpose, they require a solid design approach that considers both inputs from the radio interface and the upper-layer services at every design step. The modelization of radio area coverage is a key component in this process and must build on feasible work hypotheses. It should be able also to interpret highly varying characteristics of dense indoor environments, technology advances, service design best practices, end-to-end integration with other network parts: Local Area Network (LAN), Wide Area Network (WAN) or Data Center Network (DCN). This work focuses on Radio Resource Management (RRM) as a key tool to achieve a solid design in WLAN indoor environments by planning frequency channel assignment, transmit directions and corresponding power levels. Its scope is limited to tackle co-channel interference but can be easily extended to address cross-channel ones. In this paper, we consider beamforming and costing techniques to augment conventional RRM’s Transmit Power Control (TPC) procedures that market-leading vendors has implemented and related research has worked on. We present a novel approach of radio coverage modelization and prove its additions to the cited related-work’s models. Our solution model runs three algorithms to evaluate transmission opportunities of Wireless Devices (WD) under the coverage area. It builds on realistic hypotheses and a thorough system operation’s understanding to evaluate such an opportunity to transmit, overcomes limitations from compared related-work’s models, and integrates a hierarchical costing system to match Service Level Agreement (SLA) expectations. The term “opportunity” in this context relates also to the new transmission’s possibilities that related-work misses often or overestimates.