Abstract Over the past few years, wireless networking technologies
have made vast forays into our daily lives. Today,
one can find 802.11 hardware and other personal wireless
technology employed at homes, shopping malls, coffee shops
and airports. Present-day wireless network deployments bear
two important properties: they are unplanned, with most access
points (APs) deployed by users in a spontaneous manner,
resulting in highly variableAPdensities; and they are unmanaged,
since manually configuring and managing a wireless
network is very complicated. We refer to such wireless deployments
as being chaotic.
In this paper, we present a study of the impact of interference
in chaotic 802.11 deployments on end-client performance.
First, using large-scale measurement data from
several cities, we show that it is not uncommon to have tens
of APs deployed in close proximity of each other. Moreover,
most APs are not configured to minimize interference
with their neighbors. We then perform trace-driven simulations
to show that the performance of end-clients could