2021 Volume E104.B Issue 1 Pages 109-117
Dense deployments of wireless local area network (WLAN) access points (APs) are accelerating to accommodate the massive wireless traffic from various mobile devices. The AP densification improves the received power at mobile devices; however, total throughput in a target area is saturated by inter-cell interference (ICI) because of the limited number of frequency channels available for WLANs. To substantially mitigate ICI, we developed and described a distributed smart antenna system (D-SAS) proposed for dense WLAN AP deployment in this paper. We also describe a system configuration based on our D-SAS approach. In this approach, the distributed antennas externally attached to each AP can be switched so as to make the transmit power match the mobile device's conditions (received power and packet type). The gains obtained by the antenna switching effectively minimize the transmission power required of each AP. We also describe experimental measurements taken in a stadium using a system prototype, the results show that D-SAS offers double the total throughput attained by a centralized smart antenna system (C-SAS).
