To overlap or not to overlap: Enabling Channel Bonding in High-Density WLANs

Wireless local area networks (WLANs) are the most popular kind of wireless Internet connection because of their simplicity of deployment and operation. As a result, the number of devices accessing the Internet through WLANs such as laptops, smartphones, or wearables, is increasing drastically at the same time that applications' throughput requirements do. To cope with these challenges, channel bonding (CB) techniques are used for enabling higher data rates by transmitting in wider channels, thus increasing spectrum efficiency. However, important issues like higher potential co-channel and adjacent channel interference arise when bonding channels. This may harm the performance of the carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) protocol because of recurrent backoff freezing while making nodes more sensitive to hidden node effects. In this paper, we address the following point at issue: is it convenient for high-density (HD) WLANs to use wider channels and potentially overlap in the spectrum? First, we highlight key aspects of DCB in toy scenarios through a continuous time Markov network (CTMN) model. Then, by means of extensive simulations covering a wide range of traffic loads and access point (AP) densities, we show that dynamic channel bonding (DCB) - which adapts the channel bandwidth on a per-packet transmission - significantly outperforms traditional single-channel on average. Nevertheless, results also corroborate that DCB is more prone to generate unfair situations where WLANs may starve. Contrary to most of the current thoughts pushing towards non-overlapping channels in HD deployments, we highlight the benefits of allocating channels as wider as possible to WLANs altogether with implementing adaptive access policies to cope with the unfairness situations that may appear.