Method and apparatus for channel selection in a wireless local area network

A wireless access point (WAP) transceiver apparatus supporting wireless local area network (WLAN) communications with associated station nodes on selected orthogonal frequency-division multiplexed (OFDM) communication channels;

• and the WAP transceiver apparatus comprising:
• at least one antenna;
• a plurality of shared and discrete components coupled to one another to form a transmit path and a receive path coupled to the at least one antenna and supporting wireless communications across a maximum transceiver bandwidth spanning more than one of the communication channels including:
• a tunable oscillator for adjusting a center frequency of the transceivers maximum bandwidth;
• a channel evaluator coupled to the receive path components to evaluate communication channels including projecting a capacity constraint on a selected communication channel supporting WLAN communications with the associated station nodes;
• a channel segregator coupled to the transmit and receive path components and responsive to the projection of a capacity constraint by channel evaluator to initiate a complementary operational phase by segregating the maximum bandwidth into an operational portion supporting ongoing WLAN communications and a monitored portion limited to monitoring a backup channel as a prospective operational communication channel, and to explore backup communications channels by incremental changes to the center frequency of the tunable oscillator during the complementary operational phase, which expose at a leading edge of a resultant sliding window spanning the maximum transceiver bandwidth previously un-monitored channels for monitoring as backup channels by the channel evaluator concurrently with discarding an existing one of the operational communication channels at a trailing edge of the sliding window and at a conclusion of the complementary phase to re-integrate in a dedicated operational phase all segregated portions of the maximum bandwidth to exclusively support operational WLAN communications on a selected one of the backup channel and the communication channel.