Decentralized Access Point Selection Architecture for Wireless LANs

Abstract

Wireless LANs have been widely deployed, and multiple access points (APs) will be much more likely to be available there for STAs, which can roam from one AP to another by some rule. We here focus on an efficient and fair way to use the wireless access resources provided by multiple APs. In particular, our major concern is to develop a decentralized way to enable each of STAs to select an appropriate one of available APs independently. A straightforward way is to select an AP with strongest signal, which will be, however, shown to need further improvement. Hence, we propose decentralized AP selection strategies to achieve an efficient and fair share of wireless access resources, and evaluate them by simulations. Through our results, the proposed strategies can attain an excellent throughput performance by use of the number of active STAs sharing each AP even if STAs employ the strategies only when entering the wireless LAN. In addition, if STAs roam from one AP to another in response to changing situation, the total throughput and fairness can be further improved very much. keyword

Efficient multicasting over large-scale WLANs through controlled association

“…The problem of unbalanced AP load under RSSI based association was discussed in [2]. In [3,4], new metrics were studied to select a unicast AP instead of signal strength. Packet error rate and number of users were used in [3].…”

“…In [3,4], new metrics were studied to select a unicast AP instead of signal strength. Packet error rate and number of users were used in [3]. The authors showed deployability and robustness of their AP selection architecture.…”

“…Although association control has already been considered by both the research community and the industry, previous research on association control in WLANs primarily focused on unicast traffic [2,3,4,5,6]. The problem of unbalanced AP load under RSSI-based association is discussed in [2].…”

“…The problem of unbalanced AP load under RSSI-based association is discussed in [2]. In [3,4], metrics other than RSSI are evaluated for association with APs, but only for unicast traffic. These works do not consider load-balancing between APs.…”

A Proposal of Access Point Selection Method Based on Cooperative Movement of Both Access Points and Users

“…To solve this problem, various AP selection methods [6]- [13] have been proposed and evaluated. In particular, [13] proposed an AP selection method based on cooperative movement of a new joining user and demonstrated that it improves system throughput (User-Only-Mobility Method: UOMM).…”