Transmit power control mechanisms in IEEE 802.11 cellular networks

Abstract

Actually, Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) are being extensively deployed in many places to provide easy access to Internet. Moreover, networks that span large buildings or campuses must comprise multiple cells. Surprisingly, multicell environments that correspond to realistic situations in highly deployed areas have received little attention in the literature.If we compare the system performance in a multicell scenario with its behavior in an isolated single cell, we can observe an important performance decrease that becomes higher with the growth of the transmission data rate employed and due to co-channel interference.In this paper, we propose some power control mechanisms to operate in IEEE 802.11 cellular networks. With the employment of such methods we aim at reducing the interference influence on network performance and at homogenizing the behavior of the stations placed at different spatial positions with respect to their access point. Results exposed show that the employment of such power control mechanisms leads to an important reduction in the interference level.