Traffic-Aware Channel Assignment in Enterprise Wireless LANs

Campus and enterprise wireless networks are increasingly characterized by ubiquitous coverage and rising traffic demands. Efficiently assigning channels to Access Points (APs) in these networks can significantly affect the performance and capacity of the WLANs. The state-of-the-art approaches assign channels statically, without considering prevailing traffic demands. In this paper, the authors show that the quality of a channel assignment can be improved significantly by incorporating observed traffic demands at APs and clients into the assignment process. They refer to this as traffic-aware channel assignment. They conduct extensive trace-driven and synthetic simulations and identify deployment scenarios where traffic-awareness is likely to be of great help, and scenarios where the benefit is minimal.