User-aware WLAN Transmit Power Control in the Wild
Jonatan Krolikowski, Zied Ben Houidi, Dario Rossi

TL;DR
This paper presents a novel user-aware transmit power control system for WLANs that adapts to user distribution, improving signal strength and reducing interference in a real-world network.
Contribution
It introduces a new approach to estimate user densities from historical data and applies machine learning to handle missing measurements, demonstrating practical benefits.
Findings
Median signal strength increased by 15dBm
Airtime interference decreased significantly
Uplink signal decreased by 5dBm due to terminal limitations
Abstract
In Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), Access point (AP) transmit power influences (i) received signal quality for users and thus user throughput, (ii) user association and thus load across APs and (iii) AP coverage ranges and thus interference in the network. Despite decades of academic research, transmit power levels are still, in practice, statically assigned to satisfy uniform coverage objectives. Yet each network comes with its unique distribution of users in space, calling for a power control that adapts to users' probabilities of presence, for example, placing the areas with higher interference probabilities where user density is the lowest. Although nice on paper, putting this simple idea in practice comes with a number of challenges, with gains that are difficult to estimate, if any at all. This paper is the first to address these challenges and evaluate in a production…
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Taxonomy
TopicsWireless Networks and Protocols · Indoor and Outdoor Localization Technologies · Advanced MIMO Systems Optimization
