Development of Access Point Selection Architecture with Avoiding Interference For WLANs

Abstract

Multiple access points (APs) will be much more likely to be available for stations (STAs) due to the spread of wireless LANs. Within this context, we have developed a decentralized AP selection architecture for wireless LANs, and demonstrated that the proposed scheme can achieve an efficient and fair share of wireless access resources [2, 3]. Another issue regarding AP selection is the interference among both APs and STAs because channels partially overlap neighboring channels with the IEEE 802.11b/g standard. Therefore, we first discuss our investigations through experiments into how interference among both APs and STAs affects throughput. Based on these experiments, we propose a decentralized AP selection scheme that avoids interference, and demonstrate that the proposed solution can alleviate the effects of interference and improve throughput compared with the existing AP selection scheme. In addition, we implemented the proposed architecture on actual devices and added a function for avoiding interference. Evaluations in terms of our scheme?s effectiveness and feasibility revealed that the proposed architecture can actually improve the throughput of wireless LAN systems compared with the existing RSSI based scheme.