A Transmit Power Control Proposal for IEEE 802.11 Cellular Networks

Actually, the idea of designing an outdoor cellular network based on WLAN IEEE 802.11 results very attractive, due to the several advantages that this technology presents. It offers the equipment at a lower cost, operates in unlicensed spectrum and allows higher data rates. If we realize a comparison of the system performance between a cellular environment and an isolated single cell scenario we observe that the first situation exhibits a considerable decrease, due to co-channel interference, that rises with the growth of the transmission data rate employed. In this paper, we propose a power control mechanism, as a method to reduce the interference influence on network performance, and to homogenize the behavior of the different stations in the system. We present its performance under different load conditions and compare this behavior with the original case, without the employment of any power control mechanism.