Characterizing WLAN medium utilization for Radio Environment Maps

This paper explores the possibility to use the medium utilization as a metric to be included in Radio Environment Maps (REMs) of WLAN networks. The main objective is to build REMs that go beyond the spectrum use and that can be used to improve deployment and operation of WLANs. Specifically, the paper focuses on, first, exploring the possibility to approximate wireless channel utilization as a spatial random field. Second, the paper proposes an approach to obtain distributed measurements of medium utilization and spatial characterizations of to build utilization maps. And, third, the paper studies the performance of regular spatial interpolation techniques when used to build utilization maps. We have used a WLAN network testbed to support the study for which we obtain and analyze practical maps. Our experimental results show that medium utilization of any location of the area under study can be estimated with average errors of 10% by only using a limited number of measurement points.