About the practicality of using partially overlapping channels in IEEE 802.11 b/g networks

IEEE 802.11 WLANs are currently one of the most popular wireless technologies, but their immediate success results in dense deployments and high demand of user traffic. This in turn leads to decrease in throughput and poor spectrum utilization. Especially in the 2.4 GHz ISM band, where the spectrum is a very scarce resource, all available WLAN channels should be exploited in the best possible way to achieve higher utilization. One way to reach this goal is the usage of partially overlapping channels (POC). Most of the previous work related to POC is based on two major studies addressing 802.11 b, but none of them evaluates the POC behavior in the 802.11 g networks. Moreover, most of the previous results are based on simulations. The main contribution of this work is an experimental evaluation of POC in 802.11g networks. In this paper we confirm quantitatively that 802.11b reacts as expected from the previous studies, while 802.11 g reacts entirely different to the presence of adjacent channel interference. That leads to the conclusion that the usage of POC for 802.11g is not recommended.