A study on transmission power control for wireless LAN under overlapping BSS environment

Recently, with the widespread use of wireless local area network (WLAN), many access points (APs) and stations (STAs) of WLAN are densely employed. Since the dense deployment of APs causes an overlapping basic service set (OBSS) environment which results in increased interference, the area spectral efficiency decreases. In this paper, in order to improve the area spectral efficiency under OBSS environment, we proposed a transmission power control scheme using an indicator issued from a neighbor AP. If the AP knows that the channel occupancy rate (COR) of OBSS is increasing by reporting from associated STAs, it issues an indicator, and other AP hearing the indicator change their transmission power accordingly. We evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme by computer simulation with different AP separations. Simulation results show the proposed scheme achieves high area spectral efficiency.