Connectivity has become paramount in modern societies over the past two decades. With the immense rise in the number of laptops, tablets, and smartphones, most people nowadays expect to have access to free Wi-Fi in a variety .
Connectivity has become paramount in modern societies over the past two decades. With the immense rise in the number of laptops, tablets, and smartphones, most people nowadays expect to have access to free Wi-Fi in a variety of public and private spaces. Some common examples include airports, restaurants, and libraries, but even parks, trains, and subways offer Wi-Fi in some cities.
However, most wireless environments are based on the IEEE802.11 WLAN standards. Though undoubtedly an amazing feat of engineering, these standards suffer from inherent problems that can lower their performance for all users in a network.
For example, if a slow user joins a wireless local-area network (WLAN), their slow transmission rate can affect the throughput rate of other users, since users share the communication channels of the access point (AP, or «router») by taking turns using it. Moreover, users can also interfere with each other when attempting to communicate with the AP, negatively impacting each other’s performance.
Scientists have come up with a few strategies to try to minimize the effects of these problems and improve the overall throughput of APs. Some of these methods are cooperative, meaning that users can be prompted by the AP to change their position in order to improve system throughput.
Though this is indeed a promising strategy, many existing techniques fail to simultaneously consider the interference between users and each user’s transmission rate.
