Understanding the Limitations of Transmit Power Control for Indoor WLANs

A wide range of Transmit Power Control (TPC) algorithms have been proposed in recent literature to reduce interference and increase capacity in 802.11 wireless networks. However, few of them have made it to practice. In many cases this gap is attributed to lack of suitable hardware support in wireless cards to implement these algorithms. In particular, many research efforts have indicated that wireless card vendors need to support power control mechanisms in a fine-grained manner both in the number of possible power levels and the time granularity at which the controls can be applied.