Distributed radio resource usage optimization of WLANs based on IEEE 1900.4 architecture

IEEE 1900.4 is the recently approved standard which specify a policy-based radio resource management (RRM) framework where the decision-making process is distributed between the network-terminal entities. By exploiting the cooperative exchange of context information between the network-terminal entities, the standard aims to facilitate the optimization of radio resource usage to improve the overall composite capacity and QoS of wireless networks in a multiple radio access technologies (multi-RAT) landscape. In this paper, we demonstrate how IEEE 1900.4 standard can be employed to legacy radio access network, in particular, a multiple access point (multi-AP) based WLAN to effectuate distributed radio resources usage optimization, corresponding to one of the three use cases defined in the standard through a load adaptation policy (LAP). Through simulations, we show that overall composite capacity and QoS in terms of QoS balance can be improved by 15% and 23% respectively and the total number of handover can be reduced by 72% with IEEE 1900.4 RRM as compared to a network-distributed RRM architecture.