NSDI '08 – Abstract
Pp. 73–88 of the Proceedings
Designing High Performance Enterprise Wi-Fi Networks
Rohan Murty, Harvard University; Jitendra Padhye, Ranveer Chandra, Alec Wolman, and Brian Zill, Microsoft Research
Abstract
Use of mobile computing devices such as laptops, PDAs, and Wi-Fi enabled
phones is increasing in the workplace. As the usage of corporate 802.11
wireless networks (WLANs) grows, network performance is becoming a
significant concern. We have built DenseAP, a novel system for improving
the performance of enterprise WLANs using a dense deployment of access
points (APs). In sharp contrast with wired networks, one cannot increase
the capacity of a WLAN by simply deploying more equipment (APs). To
increase capacity, the APs must be assigned appropriate channels
and the clients must make intelligent decisions about which AP to
associate with. Furthermore, the decisions about channel assignment,
and associations must be based on a global view of the entire WLAN,
rather than the local viewpoint of an individual client or AP. Given
the diversity of Wi-Fi devices in use today, another constraint on the
design of DenseAP is that it must not require any modification to Wi-Fi
clients. In this paper, we show how the DenseAP system addresses these
challenges, and provides significant improvements in performance over
existing WLANs.
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