Fig. 18 presents the performance comparison in terms of network-wide PER, throughput, and fairness. The heuristic algorithm lowers PER by 7 percentage point at maximum compared to the random and RSSI-based allocation schemes as shown in Fig. 18a. The random and RSSI-based allocation schemes show almost the same performance because each AP chooses a primary channel in a greedy manner without considering others’ choices. And our heuristic algorithm shows near optimal performance. The enhanced RTS/CTS handshake avoids collision by reserving spaces at both the transmitter and receiver sides, which also results in around 4 percentage point improvement. However, it also suffers from the HC problem since RTS/CTS messages are also transmitted with a fixed transmission power regardless of the bandwidth usage. Therefore, our channel allocation approach along with the enhanced RTS/CTS scheme shows the best performance