Link dependence probabilities in IEEE 802.11 infrastructure WLANs

Interference management (RF management) remains one of the main challenges facing the design and deployment of large-scale WLAN. RF management involves the detection, estimation and control of power level, channel allocations and link schedules, to improve the performance of the wireless network. Among interfering links, one can find different types of dependencies. While some of these types can be predicted with relatively low overheads, observing and inferring other types can be a challenging task. In this paper, we ask the question - in WLANs, what is the probability of different types of pair-wise link dependencies? We answer this question by deriving analytical expressions for various types of link dependencies seen in IEEE 802.11 WLANs, numerically evaluating them, and comparing them against simulations.