A Reactive Reporting Scheme for Distributed Sensing in Multi-Band Wireless LAN System

Abstract

A multi-band wireless local area network (WLAN) enables flexible use of multiple frequency bands. To efficiently monitor radio resources in multi-band WLANs, a distributed-sensing system that employs a number of stations (STAs) is considered to alleviate sensing constraints at access points (APs). This paper examines the distributed sensing that expands the sensing coverage area and monitors multiple object channels by employing STA-based sensing. To avoid issuing unnecessary reports, each STA autonomously judges whether it should make a report by comparing the importance of its own sensing result and that of the overheard report. We address how to efficiently collect the necessary sensing information from a large number of STAs. We propose a reactive reporting scheme that is highly scalable by the number of STAs to collect such sensing results as the channel occupancy ratio. Evaluation results show that the proposed scheme keeps the number of reports low even if the number of STAs increases. Our proposed sensing scheme provides large sensing coverage.