A Channel Control Scheme Using Periodic NAV Notification for Non-Overlapping Channel Allocation in Dense WLAN Environments

To mitigate adjacent channel interference caused by overlapping allocations in densely deployed 2.4 GHz-band wireless LAN (WLAN), this paper proposes a distributed channel selection control scheme. The proposed scheme introduces access control stations (AC-STAs) that periodically send Network Allocation Vector (NAV) frames to discourage the use of overlapping channels and guide Basic Service Sets (BSSs) toward non-overlapping channels (e.g., CH #1, CH #6, and CH #11). Leveraging the standard NAV mechanism defined in IEEE 802.11, the proposed scheme ensures compatibility with existing devices and requires no protocol modifications. To reduce potential Medium Access Control (MAC) efficiency loss due to NAV transmissions, the proposed scheme introduces simultaneous transmission of NAV frames. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme enhances the throughput compared to conventional autonomous channel selection and achieves performance close to that of an ideal channel allocation scenario.