A Framework for Decentralized Wireless LAN Resource Management

The proliferation of wireless local area network (WLAN) deployments in enterprises, public areas, and homes will cause frequent geographical coverage overlap among multiple networks. A recent growing interest is the coordination among WLAN providers for efficient resource management over a large coverage area. While radio resource management for a single WLAN has been studied extensively, little research work addresses cooperative resource management over multiple WLANs. The lack of cooperative resource management can cause significant performance degradation due to inter-WLAN interference. Moreover, unbalanced loads among multiple networks can incur congestion in a few WLANs while foregoing unused excess resources in others. Hence, resource management among multiple WLANs can make the best use of available radio resources and accommodate more users system-wide. In this chapter, a fully decentralized cooperative resource management framework using multi-agent systems for multiple WLANs in interference environments is explained that incorporates the predictability of network states and decentralized control through multi-agent systems. The proposed framework emphasizes the underlying predictability of network conditions and promotes management solutions tailored to different interference environments. The impacts of both inter-WLAN co-channel interference and co-located interference sources from wireless personal area networks (WPANs) are considered.