A channel selection strategy for WLAN in urban areas by regression analysis

This paper presents a strategy to choose WiFi channels in urban areas. We consider (i) inter-channel interference where adjacent channels interfere with each other in WiFi systems and (ii) urban situations where many APs in different systems are deployed in an uncoordinated way. As it is often hard to identify the channel with less interference in such a situation, we present a channel scoring function that estimates the performance level of each channel. To build the scoring function, we have conducted exhaustive simulations with a large number of scenarios, and multiple regression analysis has been applied where channel occupancy patterns, traffic volumes and RSS in those channels are used as explanatory variables. To evaluate our method, this scoring function was examined in a realistic scenario where several APs interfere with the AP of interest. We have confirmed that the scores and the actual performance are well-matched where the Spearman´s rank correlation coefficient was sufficiently high and can identify the top-ranked channel as well.