Dynamic frequency allocation scheme for a standalone wireless access point

In this paper, we introduce and implement a new dynamic channel allocation scheme for Infrastructure Wireless LANs. The scheme is based on the Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) of the IEEE802.11 standard. The concept of the scheme is to dynamically distribute non-overlapping channels in the 2.4GHz band between coexisting and nearby infrastructure wireless LANs in order to solve the congestion and interference problems. The achieved aggregate network throughput is increased since wireless stations are able to change from congested or noisy channels dynamically to other channels with less noise and interference. They can also avoid long backoff waiting times. The scheme is backward compatible with any version of the IEEE802.11 standard including the latest IEEE802.11n. Our implementation of the scheme is performed on the open source OpenWrt firmware. Experiments showed the superiority of our scheme over legacy DCF.