Analysis of Traffic Agent Scheme for Coverage Improvement in Wireless Local Area Networks

Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) can provide high data-rate wireless multimedia applications to end users in a limited geographical area and has been widely deployed in recent years. For indoor WLAN systems, how to efficiently improve service coverage is a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a coverage improvement scheme that can identify suitable Mobile Stations(MS) in good service zones and use them as Traffic Agents (TA) to relay traffic for those out-of-coverage MS’s. The service coverage area of WLAN system is therefore expanded. Mathematical analysis, verified by computer simulations, shows that the scheme can effectively reduce blocking probability when the system is lightly loaded.