PACA: Peer-Assisted Channel Assignment for Home Wireless LANs

A home network is a residential local area net- work, in which users are networking their PCs, laptops or wireless multimedia appliances to use a single residential access point (AP) or gateway connecting to the Internet. As network- capable appliances continue to gain momentum in the home, home networks are becoming increasingly popular. The problem arising from the increasing number of "wireless home" is the interference introduced from neighbor's home networks which leads to throughput dropped precipitously. This problem is different from the traditional channel assignment problem in WLAN. We are considering how home wireless network can self- configure its operating channel to minimize interference with other networks instead of how network administrator assigns channel to different APs. In this paper, we propose a peer- assisted channel assignment algorithm, termed PACA, for home wireless LAN based on local information. A newly power on AP automatically configures itself to operate on a channel with least interference. Mobile node helps other APs to do channel assignment and switching dynamically by providing traffic load information. Our simulation and experimental measurements show that the algorithm reduces interference among different networks and improves user throughput.