======= Review 1 ======= *** Strengths: What are the most important merits of the paper? Please explain in one or more sentences. In this paper, authors proposed and evaluated centralized AP parameterization guidelines. They assumed a WLAN operating on a single 160 MHz band and that can be divided non-overlapping 20/40/80/160MHz channels. And they sutudied the relationship amaong channel bandwidth, transmissino power and the value of CST of the peroformance of the network. *** Weaknesses: What are the major weaknesses in the paper? Please explain in one or more sentences. Their target scenarios and appplications are not clear for this approach in the real world. For their simulation they are using UDP traffic model, however we can not understand what kind of application they are considered. *** Feedback to Authors: Please provide detailed comments that will help the authors to understand the weaknesses in their paper and improve their work. This section is very important if you rate the paper as a reject. Sutudy of the relationship amaong channel bandwidth, transmissino power and the value of CST of the peroformance of the network is very important. However it is difficult understand your target scenarios and aplications in the real world from your paper. I would like to see that you will use realistic traffic models for some special scenario in the real world. *** Scientific/Technical Quality: How would you rate the scientific/technical quality of the paper? (1 being worst score, 5 being best score) Excellent (4) *** Innovation: How would you rate the innovation of the paper, the news being received by the reader? (1 being worst score, 5 being best score) Average (3) *** Presentation Quality: How would you rate the quality of presentation within the paper? (1 being worst score, 5 being best score) Average (3) *** Overall Recommendation: What is your over all recommendation for this paper? Accept (4) ======= Review 2 ======= *** Strengths: What are the most important merits of the paper? Please explain in one or more sentences. The paper presents a NS-3 based simulation study on the use of wide channels in WiFi Networks. The channel allocation and management for dense 802.11ac based WiFi network is an important and interesting problem, has practical significance. *** Weaknesses: What are the major weaknesses in the paper? Please explain in one or more sentences. -- It is a simulation based study. -- The authors, based on simulations, claimed that the performance obtained on the single 160 MHz channel with low transmission power is significantly higher than the one observed when using the maximum transmission power, irrespective of the channel allocation. While this claim might be correct, it is misleading in the sense that it ignores the impact of client side configurations and criticize that current practice is wrong. See my comments below. *** Feedback to Authors: Please provide detailed comments that will help the authors to understand the weaknesses in their paper and improve their work. This section is very important if you rate the paper as a reject. "The widely accepted approach in the literature on WLAN configuration [2][4][5] is to allocate narrower channels and lower AP transmission power as the network density (in terms of APs) increases." If you read [2] carefully, it clearly points our why using 20MHz channel is recommended (quoted from [2]): -- While using 40-MHz or 80-Mhz channels might seem like an attractive way to increase overall throughput, one of the consequences is reduced spectral efficiency due to legacy (20-MHz only) clients not being able to take advantage of the wider channel width resulting in the idle spectrum on wider channels. Depending on the RF environment, even clients capable of 40 and 80 MHz may only use the 20 MHz base channel and is often observed in highly contentious RF environments. Due to the mix of clients usually seen in high-density deployments (such as laptops, mobile phones, and tablets etc.) the capabilities of clients in such environments also vary (some will support 20-Mhz, some will support 40-MHz and some will support 80-Mhz channels). Due to this, it is better to have each client communicating at the lowest common channel width, giving each client equal access to the network. It is better to have 4 clients communication at 20-MHz with 4 access points, rather than 4 clients of mixed capability communicating with 1 access points at 80-MHz resulting in idle. *** Scientific/Technical Quality: How would you rate the scientific/technical quality of the paper? (1 being worst score, 5 being best score) Marginal (2) *** Innovation: How would you rate the innovation of the paper, the news being received by the reader? (1 being worst score, 5 being best score) Marginal (2) *** Presentation Quality: How would you rate the quality of presentation within the paper? (1 being worst score, 5 being best score) Marginal (2) *** Overall Recommendation: What is your over all recommendation for this paper? Reject (2) ======= Review 3 ======= *** Strengths: What are the most important merits of the paper? Please explain in one or more sentences. The paper is of a more fundamental type, challenging the current state-of-the-art. It contains clearly formulated messages about how to configure dense WiFi settings, with some (somehow) counter-intuitive recommendations, but clearly demonstrated positive effects. *** Weaknesses: What are the major weaknesses in the paper? Please explain in one or more sentences. No major weaknesses. (IMHO, the only challengeable point might be that the authors build upon ns-3 simulations -- whose models are hopefully generic enough for the scenario at hand -- which on the other hand opens up for discussions at the conference, but even for future work.) *** Feedback to Authors: Please provide detailed comments that will help the authors to understand the weaknesses in their paper and improve their work. This section is very important if you rate the paper as a reject. When thinking about the approach, the reviewer is reminded of human conversation in a big group (e.g. conference mingle), when the volumes are turned up subsequently without much use, while asking people to turn down their volumes helps to increase the understandability (probably due to less long-distance interference). So there seems quite some potential for "digging deeper". (The reviewer also remembers having seen some theoretical work in this direction maybe a decade ago, but unfortunately cannot remember the authors anymore -- sorry!) Thanks for the generic clarification (Section IV, end of par. 1) regarding the confidence intervals of figures 2--5, which are highly telling. Regarding future work, it might be interesting to implement the proposed approach in a system of WiFi access points, and to test the rules and settings in order to back up the simulation results. A minor typo: page 1, right column, line 8: "the the" *** Scientific/Technical Quality: How would you rate the scientific/technical quality of the paper? (1 being worst score, 5 being best score) Excellent (4) *** Innovation: How would you rate the innovation of the paper, the news being received by the reader? (1 being worst score, 5 being best score) Extraordinary (5) *** Presentation Quality: How would you rate the quality of presentation within the paper? (1 being worst score, 5 being best score) Excellent (4) *** Overall Recommendation: What is your over all recommendation for this paper? Strong Accept (5) *********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************** Comments for previous version submitted at ICCCN 2019 *********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************** ----------------------- REVIEW 1 --------------------- SUBMISSION: 117 TITLE: On the Use of Wide Channels in WiFi Networks AUTHORS: Saber Malekmohammadi, Catherine Rosenberg and Razvan Stanica ----------- Overall evaluation ----------- SCORE: -2 (reject) ----- TEXT: The authors claim that they propose parameterization guidelines to optimize the throughput of Wi-Fi networks which have densely deployed access points (APs). In more detail, they claim that for each AP, using the widest possible single channel with a much lower power will bring higher throughput to the network, comparing to the current practice which uses several narrower channels at maximum power. The paper presents an optimized network model and demonstrates its performance through simulations. The results show that their model brings significant performance w.r.t the state of the art benchmarks in terms of geometric mean throughput. However, to offer high throughput, the model sacrifices the number of communication channels, which then limits the maximum user number in the whole network. That makes the model useless in the application scenarios described by the paper (e.g. a university campus or a workplace with dense APs), because in these scenarios the user numbers are usually huge. Otherwise, why do they deploy densely APs? ----------------------- REVIEW 2 --------------------- SUBMISSION: 117 TITLE: On the Use of Wide Channels in WiFi Networks AUTHORS: Saber Malekmohammadi, Catherine Rosenberg and Razvan Stanica ----------- Overall evaluation ----------- SCORE: -1 (weak reject) ----- TEXT: In this paper, the authors investigate the joint channel, power and CST allocation problem in dense WiFi networks. The most exciting finding is that better performance can be achieved by using wide channels and less transmission power, which is contrary to what most of the current schemes do, where the tendency is to allocate narrow channels in dense deployment. The authors also propose a series of guidelines to select the right parameters per AP based on their findings, and this is also verified by simulations. Generally speaking, this paper is well written, however the reviewer still have the following two concerns. 1. A theoretical analysis on the network performance by taking into account the channel bandwidth, transmission power and CST is missing, which decreases the novelty of this paper. 2. The findings and guidelines should be verified in more practical scenarios, e.g., a real deployment of WiFi network, rather than NS-2 simulator only. This will be much more convincing to the readers. ----------------------- REVIEW 3 --------------------- SUBMISSION: 117 TITLE: On the Use of Wide Channels in WiFi Networks AUTHORS: Saber Malekmohammadi, Catherine Rosenberg and Razvan Stanica ----------- Overall evaluation ----------- SCORE: 2 (accept) ----- TEXT: This paper deals with configuration setting for APs under WiFi network, such as choosing specific channel to use. The motivation of this work is well addressed as the evolution of deployment WiFi network. The writing is easy to follow and the figure is well presented. The paper conducts experiments on both uniform AP and non-uniform AP settings, and the results are solid and persuasive. Finally the work provides guidelines for the network settings. I think this work is meaningful and instructive for AP configuration settings under WiFi networks.