A Cooperative Strategy for the Deployment of Multi-AP Coordination in IEEE 802.11 Networks

This paper develops a cooperative deployment strategy for multi-access point (AP) coordination in IEEE 802.11 networks. This strategy focuses on the radio resource utilization and the link performance in overlapping basic service set (OBSS) environments. A key challenge arises in prioritizing the assignment of resource units (RUs) to OBSS regions, as the RU contention within the coverage of an AP can propagate interference to neighboring APs, causing network-wide inefficiencies. Existing strategies often rely on dedicated resource management agents, which are incompatible with the ad-hoc deployment nature of IEEE 802.11 networks. To address this, a cooperative framework is proposed that enables APs and users to collaboratively optimize the RU allocation through local coordination. The underlying principle focuses on adaptively scheduling the RU allocation in OBSS regions through distributed coordination among APs. Numerical results demonstrate performance improvements in both indoor and outdoor environments, as supported by theoretical guarantees on the convergence and global optimality. In particular, the proposed strategy ensures a high proportion of users meeting the SINR threshold when the number of users remains below twice the number of available RUs, highlighting its effectiveness in dense network deployments.