Dynamic Channel Bonding Algorithm for Densely Deployed 802.11ac Networks

To meet the rising demand of mobile data, IEEE 802.11ac was recently developed to offer better network performance than previous IEEE 802.11 standards, representing the 5G Wi-Fi technology. One of the new technologies added to IEEE 802.11ac is a dynamic bandwidth channel access scheme that supports channel bonding (CB) with an up to 160 MHz bandwidth. However, the use of CB increases the number of stations sharing the same medium, resulting in an increased collision rate and severe interference caused by overlapping sub-channels. This problem is further aggravated in densely deployed wireless networks where the service ranges of access points (APs) are likely to be highly overlapping. To resolve these issues, we present an analytical throughput model that considers the effect of both collisions and interference. With this analytical model, we formulate the CB problem to optimize the throughput along with the traffic demand and propose a genetic algorithm for solving the problem. Further, a dynamic channel bonding algorithm (named DCB) is proposed to solve the problem with lower complexity. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm provides a higher performance than other recent dynamic CB algorithms with respect to the throughput achieved for the traffic demand.