Patent ID: 8503419

Claim:
A method for controlling a wireless local area network, which includes a centralized performance management controller and a plurality of network elements, the method comprising: determining interference between each network element and every other network element of the plurality of network elements; populating an interference matrix identifying the interference between each combination of two network elements of the plurality of network elements; generating an adjacency matrix based on the interference matrix indicating each combination of the two network elements of the plurality of network elements that has an unacceptable level of interference; and improving overall performance of the wireless local area network by reducing the unacceptable levels of interference indicated by the adjacency matrix, wherein the method is performed both repetitively at predetermined fixed intervals to account for interference changes in the wireless local area network and at predetermined events, including when a new network element is added to the wireless local area network, and wherein the generating an adjacency matrix includes modeling the adjacency matrix as a graph by creating a vertex for each network element, coloring the graph such that no adjacent vertices have the same color, and pruning most recently added nodes from the graph in a sequential order starting at the newest added node when a predetermined number of colors are insufficient to color the graph.