Management Enhancement for WLAN November 2011 doc.: IEEE 802.11-11/1507r1 Nov 2012 Management Enhancement for WLAN Date: 2012-11-06 Authors: Yunlu Liu (China Mobile) Stephen McCann, RIM

November 2011 doc.: IEEE 802.11-11/1507r1 Nov 2012 Abstract With the increasing use of WLAN, especially the use for cellular offload, several problems are introduced, such as low accessibility, abnormal traffic interruption, etc. These problems may be caused by interference due to densely deployed APs, too many STAs, and so on. It’s hard and costly to fix these problems in time. We suggest to study automatic solution for this issue. Yunlu Liu (China Mobile) Stephen McCann, RIM

Current situations CMCC has deployed 3 million APs September 2012 doc.: IEEE 802.11-12/xxxxr0 Nov 2012 Current situations CMCC has deployed 3 million APs Most of the APs are deployed densely at the hotspots, e.g., airport, shopping mall, etc. In 2012, more than 17% of the cell phone traffic in CMCC network is from WLAN Only three non-overlapping channels are available in 2.4GHz ISM band: the channel conflict is a big issue Since 2012, the traffic of WLAN keeps increase at the rate 18% per month Increased number of STAs: hard to connect to an AP and data congestion may happen . Yunlu Liu (China Mobile) Yasuhiko Inoue (NTT), et. al.

September 2012 doc.: IEEE 802.11-12/xxxxr0 Nov 2012 Challenges During the operation of WLAN, many problems arise and it’s hard and costly to fix: It is labor costly to identify the problems by checking all APs one by one Furthermore, some of APs are located in places where hard for testers to implement routine check Automatic solutions are necessary . Yunlu Liu (China Mobile) Yasuhiko Inoue (NTT), et. al.

September 2012 doc.: IEEE 802.11-12/xxxxr0 Nov 2012 Proposal We think it’s very important for operators to observe these problems and fix them as soon as possible to improve the user experience. Therefore, we suggest to study more on management enhancement for WLAN. Two use cases: Accessibility: When a STA cannot access to an AP, it logs related info. (e.g. the ID of detected AP, signal strength), and report the log after successfully connecting to AP later. By doing this, the network can identify the access problem of certain AP. Abnormal traffic interruption: When a STA cannot continue its traffic due to, e.g. degraded link quality, it logs the related info. (e.g. the ID of detected AP, signal strength, channel) , and report the log after successfully connecting to AP later. Yunlu Liu (China Mobile) Yasuhiko Inoue (NTT), et. al.