Power Control in 802.11 Wireless LANs

This paper presents applications of power control techniques for performance enhancement of 802.11 wireless LANs. It is shown how the nature of the multiple-access scheme in use in these systems poses challenges for the implementation of an approach based on reduction of interference. It is also shown that the use of power control at the access point to manage its coverage area can lead to very significant performance gains. The analysis is supported by dynamic simulations providing end-to- end performance results for FTP application.