Priza: Throughput-Efficient DAS Clustering of WiFi-PLC Extenders in Enterprises

WiFi-enabled Power Line Communications (PLC) range extenders can extend coverage in homes and enterprises. However, a dense deployment of a large number of PLC extenders in enterprise settings can cause an inefficient sharing of the PLC capacity, where many extenders contend for a share of access to the backhaul network comprising of the electrical wiring (power lines), thereby drastically impacting any gains from using these extenders on the wireless part of the network. In this paper, we address this issue by developing a framework, Priza, for clustering the WiFi-PLC extenders to intelligently form a DAS (distributed antenna system) to mitigate the inefficiency of sharing the PLC backhaul. By appropriately managing clustering and reuse, Priza improves the PLC backhaul sharing, while at the same time, harnessing the power pooling and diversity gains from DAS on the wireless part of the network, to boost user throughputs. We evaluate Priza via real testbed experiments and high-fidelity simulations and demonstrate that it can increase the aggregate throughput by up to 131.5% over the non-DAS reuse baseline, 74% over the best DAS baseline that constructs equally-sized DAS cells based on extender proximity, and 331.3% over a greedy DAS baseline that creates as large DAS cells as possible.