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