United channel assignments in residential environments

Residential wireless networks have grown rapidly in the past decade. Meanwhile, dense deployments and autonomous managements of home Access Points (APs) greatly increase channel congestion levels and degrade the user experience. To address such problems, this paper proposes an architecture in residential environments called Wi-Fi Union (WU), where home APs can voluntarily join WU and become "member APs". WU helps member APs decrease their congestion levels by assigning channels in a coordinated manner with incentive considerations. First, we propose congestion level metric normalized airtime which can be passively and independently measured by member APs. Normalized airtime is further used to classify APs into heavily congested APs and lightly congested APs. A tabu search based channel assignment algorithm is presented which can decrease the congestion level of heavily congested member APs, and guarantee lightly congested member APs to be still lightly congested. Extensive NS-3 simulations driven by actual Wi-Fi data show that the united channel assignments has a 1.5 times throughput than that in the default setting on average.