TY - JOUR T1 - A client-driven approach for channel management in wireless LANs JF - IEEE Infocom Y1 - 2006 A1 - Mishra,A. A1 - Brik,V. A1 - Banerjee,S. A1 - Srinivasan, Aravind A1 - Arbaugh, William A. AB - We propose an efficient client-based approach for channel man-agement (channel assignment and load balancing) in 802.11-based WLANs that lead to better usage of the wireless spectrum. This approach is based on a “conflict set coloring” formulation that jointly performs load balancing along with channel assignment. Such a formulation has a number of advantages. First, it explicitly captures interference effects at clients. Next, it intrinsically ex- poses opportunities for better channel re-use. Finally, algorithms based on this formulation do not depend on specific physical RF models and hence can be applied efficiently to a wide-range of in- building as well as outdoor scenarios. We have performed extensive packet-level simulations and mea- surements on a deployed wireless testbed of 70 APs to validate the performance of our proposed algorithms. We show that in addi- tion to single network scenarios, the conflict set coloring formu- lation is well suited for channel assignment where multiple wire- less networks share and contend for spectrum in the same physical space. Our results over a wide range of both simulated topologies and in-building testbed experiments indicate that our approach improves application level performance at the clients by upto three times (and atleast 50%) in comparison to current best-known tech- niques. VL - 6 ER -