Wi-Fi and Super Wi-Fi Co-location for Exploiting Spectrum Heterogeneity

Abstract

We propose co-locating a Super Wi-Fi access point (AP) with a Wi-Fi AP aiming to mitigate the performance anomaly of the traditional WLAN by relocating low-rate Wi-Fi stations (STAs) in the outskirts of Wi-Fi's coverage to Super Wi-Fi. This strategy is based on the two key insights: it would enhance the throughput of Wi-Fi STAs due to the reduced number of STAs; it also provides QoS guarantees to the STAs associated with Super Wi-Fi such as enhanced data rate and average per-STA throughput than they would achieve if associated with Wi-Fi. To quantify the performance improvement by our co-location strategy, we model the system as a series of two-dimensional Markov chains and derive the steady-state probabilities and per-STA throughput. A numerical study has shown that Super Wi-Fi co-location improves Wi-Fi's average per-STA throughput up to 30 times.