Understanding the Effectiveness of a Co-Located Wireless Channel Monitoring Surrogate System

In Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), channel management is important in achieving reliable data communications and satisfying QoS requirements. The key aspects of wireless channel management are monitoring the channel quality and adapting quickly to the network conditions by switching to a better channel. We propose a wireless channel monitoring system with co-located monitoring surrogates. Our system works on multi-radio Access Points (APs) where a co-located surrogate radio monitors the condition of various channels while the master radio serves the clients for data communication. Although we have designed our system for generic WLANs, we believe it will be most useful for IEEE 802.11n networks where there are a large number of channels and dynamic frequency selection is required. Our system enables intelligent, fast channel adaptation, reduces service disruption time, and consequently helps realize the performance potential of 802.11n. We present our multi-radio co-located wireless channel monitoring surrogate system and evaluate its effectiveness on our IEEE 802.11n network testbed. We also perform case studies to demonstrate the benefit our system brings compared against the existing schemes.