Managing channel bonding with clear channel assessment in 802.11 networks

With the increasing demand for higher performance wireless local area networks (WLANs), channel bonding was first proposed in the IEEE 802.11n protocol to offer a higher data rate by combining two 20 MHz channels into one 40 MHz channel. Although much has been understood about channel bonding management, hardly any of these innovations have made it into today's IEEE 802.11 WLANs in a distributed manner. This paper presents the first step to fill the gap, by proposing a channel bonding management solution that can be readily implemented in today's commercial 802.11 devices. We conduct a measurement with off-the-shelf 802.11 devices in a real WLAN to characterize channel bonding, and then propose a channel bonding scheme based on adaptive channel clear assessment (CCA). We conduction evaluation under the typical IEEE 802.11 enterprise scenario, and the results show that our scheme improves the throughput by 37% and 46% compared to the traditional channel bonding scheme and the default CSMA/CA, respectively.