Liberal method of access point selection in wireless mesh networks

Abstract

IEEE 802.11-based wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are emerging as the promising technology to provide wireless broadband internet access. In order to access the internet via a pre-deployed WMN, a user has to associate with one of the access points (APs) present in the network. Received signal strength (RSS)-based association method defined by the IEEE 802.11 standard does not consider the channel conditions and the AP load into association process. This paper proposes a novel method of AP selection which considers the channel conditions, AP load and wireless mesh backhaul conditions. As lower-rate user association drops down the performance of higher-rate users already associated with the same AP, our method tries to minimise this negative impact. The proposed AP selection method is scalable and also independent of routing protocol and routing metric used in WMN. Through the simulations, we show that our method performs better than RSS-based AP selection method in terms of improving system throughput in WMNs.