Multi-hop Multi-AP Multi-channel Cooperation for High Efficiency WLAN

A multi-hop multi-AP multi-channel cooperation scheme, referred to as MHACWlan, is proposed for the purpose of improving the efficiency and performance of wireless local area network (WLAN) in dense scenarios, which is the top concern of HEW (High Efficiency WLAN), a IEEE 802.11 study group created in 2013. The proposed MHACWlan provides an effective way to solve the performance anomaly problem, interference problem, and the load imbalance problem in dense WLAN. In MHACWlan, we considers two-hop association to the APs for the wireless STAs with poor single-hop links to improve the throughput, assigning different channels for the two-hop links to reduce the interference and increase the throughput, and associating with more than one AP so as to balance the load. The mathematical analysis and simulation results demonstrate the performance benefits of MHACWlan compared to the traditional WLAN.