Adaptive Coordination Scheme Selection in Multi-AP WLANs

Abstract

Recently, wireless local area networks (WLAN) with dense access points (APs) and multi-AP coordination (MAPC) have emerged as promising solutions for enabling coordinated transmission and reducing interference. Several coordination schemes have been proposed for MAPC. Among them, coordinated spatial reuse (C-SR) and coordinated beamforming (C-BF) enable simultaneous transmissions within overlapping basic service sets. However, these schemes involve trade-offs: C-SR offers lower overhead but provides limited signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) gain, whereas C-BF offers significant SINR improvement at the cost of increased overhead. Consequently, the optimal scheme depends on network conditions, such as AP density and user distribution. However, conventional MAPC employs only a single coordination scheme regardless of the situation. Therefore, we propose an adaptive coordination scheme selection method that estimates the expected performance of each scheme by evaluating trade-offs based on environmental information, without relying on channel state information. Simulation results confirm that our scheme selection method outperforms conventional approaches and improves system throughput. The adaptive coordination scheme selection overcomes the performance limitations of conventional MAPC, thereby accelerating the advancement of future WLANs.