Interference-Aware Coordinated Power Allocation in Autonomous Wi-Fi Environment

Self-managed access points (APs) with growing intelligence can optimize their own performances but pose potential negative impacts on others without energy efficiency. In this paper, we focus on modeling the coordinated interaction among interest-independent and self-configured APs, and conduct the power allocation case study in the autonomous Wi-Fi scenario. Specifically, we build a `coordination Wi-Fi platform (CWP), a public platform for APs interacting with each other. OpenWrt-based APs in the physical world are mapped to virtual agents (VAs) in CWP, which communicate with each other through a standard request-reply process defined as AP talk protocol (ATP). With ATP, an active interference measurement methodology is proposed reflecting both in-range interference and hidden terminal interference, and the Nash bargaining-based power control is further formulated for interference reductions. CWP is deployed in a real office environment, where coordination interactions between VAs can bring a maximum 40-Mb/s throughput improvement with the Nash bargaining-based power control in the multi-AP experiments.