Enhancing Performance of Multi-Rate WLANs: Ant Colony Approach

The trade-off between users’ fairness and network throughput may be unacceptable in a multi-rate 802.11 WLAN environment. In this paper, we will design a new intuitive simplified mathematical model called simplified coefficient of variation (SCV) to closely reflect our topic. Through controlling the power of Access Points, SCV can optimize and improve the performance. Since our topic is a NP-hard problem, we use Ant Colony Algorithm to solve our model in a practical scenario. The simulation shows excellent results indicating that our model is efficient and superior to an existing method. Also we use software SAS to further reveal the relationships among the three indicators to illustrate the essence of our approach and an existing algorithm.