User-aware WLAN Transmit Power Control in the Wild

Abstract: In Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), Access point (AP) transmit power influences (i) received signal quality for users and thus user throughput, (ii) user association and thus load across APs and (iii) AP coverage ranges and thus interference in the network. Despite decades of academic research, transmit power levels are still, in practice, statically assigned to satisfy uniform coverage objectives. Yet each network comes with its unique distribution of users in space, calling for a power control that adapts to users' probabilities of presence, for example, placing the areas with higher interference probabilities where user density is the lowest. Although nice on paper, putting this simple idea in practice comes with a number of challenges, with gains that are difficult to estimate, if any at all. This paper is the first to address these challenges and evaluate in a production network serving thousands of daily users the benefits of a user-aware transmit power control system. Along the way, we contribute a novel approach to reason about user densities of presence from historical IEEE 802.11k data, as well as a new machine learning approach to impute missing signal-strength measurements. Results of a thorough experimental campaign show feasibility and quantify the gains: compared to state-of-the-art solutions, the new system can increase the median signal strength by 15dBm, while decreasing airtime interference at the same time. This comes at an affordable cost of a 5dBm decrease in uplink signal due to lack of terminal cooperation.