Coupling QoS provision with interference reporting in WLAN sharing communities

Driven by their low cost and ease of deployment, as well as their operation in unlicensed spectrum bands, IEEE 802.11-based Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), also termed Wi-Fi, have been established as the de facto access technology for local area wireless connectivity. Especially in densely-populated urban areas, WLAN presence is ubiquitous. Residential WLAN owners, municipalities and venue owners, among others, set up wireless hotspots for private or public use. However, one can identify two important problems that have to be efficiently tackled. On the one hand, while Wi-Fi is present practically everywhere in modern metropolitan areas, access to roaming users is typically restricted. At the same time, the broadband Internet connections WLAN Access Points (APs) are attached to may have excess capacity, thus leaving resources underutilized. On the other hand, unplanned Wi-Fi deployment leads to significant interference problems among neighbor WLANs. In this work, we exploit our prior work on WLAN sharing communities to jointly tackle the above problems. The solution we propose is based on offering users QoS benefits as an incentive to perform spectrum sensing and supply interference reports to the WLAN APs they are connected to. We present the design of our mechanisms, discuss some of their properties and investigate their expected performance overhead, especially on delay-sensitive applications like VoIP.