Practical Distributed Channel Assignment in Home Wi-Fi Networks

The efficient management of radio resources in today's home or residential Wi-Fi networks is still an open research question. Due to the chaotic and unplanned deployment of Wi-Fi Access Points (APs) and the fact that all APs are managed individually by their owners, home Wi-Fi networks suffer from performance degradation due to contention and interference. In this paper we present and showcase a distributed radio channel assignment scheme, implemented using the ResFi platform, in which neighboring home Wi-Fi APs cooperate with each other in order to negotiate radio channel selection by taking into account the instantaneous network load of neighboring APs (two hop neighborhood). While the information about the network load can be directly exchanged between ResFi-enabled APs using the ResFi out-of-band Internet control channel, the information about the network load of co-located non-ResFi APs first needs to be estimated passively by monitoring the data traffic on the radio channel. The presented demonstrator of the approach is implemented using commodity hardware and enables the audience to observe the distributed channel adaptation in real-time.