Extended Abstract: Interference Mitigation in Enterprise WLANs through Speculative Scheduling

Wireless LANs are commonplace installations in enterprise environments. Their ease of use and deployment, however, are accompanied by a difficulty in their management and security. Proposed solutions to these problems are based on centralization; in the control plane through centralized authentication and allocation of channels and power levels, and in the data plane through time slotted medium access using centralized scheduling for interference mitigation. While centralization of some control plane tasks has been shown to be feasible, centralization on the data plane is significantly harder to realize. This is because it needs to take into account the inherent variability of the wireless medium while offering bounds on delay and jitter on the control paths. In this work, we present a study of the various problems that arise in centralization of the data plane in an enterprise WLAN. We believe that a pragmatic solution for data plane centralization is the key approach to provisioning an enterprise WLAN consisting of a dense deployment of APs.