AP Selection Scheme Based on Achievable Throughputs in SDN-Enabled WLANs

Abstract

To ensure an efficient coverage and allow transparent mobility, it is common to find a number of access points (APs) deployed in the neighborhood of each other in current WLANs. A mobile terminal (MT) often has multiple potential APs that it can connect to, and the selection of an appropriate AP becomes an important factor affecting both the network performance and user experience. This paper proposes a new AP selection scheme, which is based on the analysis of achievable normalized throughputs (ANTs) that the MT could obtain in the network. Specifically, we first compute the normalized throughput that characterizes the channel competition among multiple basic service sets (BSSs) as well as MTs within the same BSS. By evaluating ANTs in situations where the MT associates with different APs, the most appropriate AP for the MT can then be selected. Then, we present the implementation of the proposed AP selection scheme under the SDN-WiFi framework, in which the AP selection process can be performed in a software manner. The experimental results show that our computations on ANTs are of high accuracy and the proposed AP selection scheme can achieve a better performance than the existing schemes in terms of both the quality of service of MTs and the fairness among MTs.