Access point selection strategy in IEEE802.11e WLAN networks

Abstract

IEEE802.11 WLAN (Wireless LAN) has been widely used in enterprise and public space such as air port. In these large WLAN networks, RRM (Radio Resource Management) is necessary for the efficient use of radio resource and also for load balancing among APs (Access Point) Since, in IEEE802.11, STA (Station) has the right to select an AP with which it will associate, AP selection mechanism implemented in STA is important for RRM. This paper proposes an AP selection mechanism, called HRFA (High-Rate First Association) in order to achieve load balancing and the efficient use of radio resource. Furthermore, IEEE802.11e is currently standardizing a MAC protocol to provide QoS (Quality of Service) in MAC layer and support real-time traffic over WLAN. In order for WLAN to be more widely used and to provide QoS in WLAN networks, the functionalities of IEEE802.11e have to be provided in WLAN devices. Our proposed HRFA can be applied to IEEE802.11e WLAN and can be implemented without any modifications in IEEE802.11 and 802.11e standard. Therefore it is useful from implementation-cost and compatibility point of views. Simulation results show that HRFA can efficiently ultilize radio resource and also achieve load balancing in IEEE802.11e WLAN networks.