Wireless Resource Sharing for Residential Access Networks

The proliferation of overlapping, always-on IEEE 802.11 Access Points (APs) in urban areas can cause spectrum sharing conflicts, inefficient bandwidth usage and power waste. Cooperation among APs could address these problems (i) by allowing under-used devices to hand over their clients to nearby APs and temporarily switch off, (ii) by balancing the load of clients among APs and thus offloading congested APs. The federated houses model provides an appealing backdrop to implement cooperation among APs. In this paper, we outline a framework that, assuming the presence of a multipurpose gateway with AP capabilities in every household, allows such cooperation through the monitoring of local wireless resources and the triggering of offloading requests toward other federated gateways. We then present simulation results in realistic settings that provide some insight on the capabilities of our framework.