Exploiting Potential Throughput Metric for Access Point Selection in Wireless LANs

概要

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With the increasing popularity of wireless LANs, more and more access points (AP) are being deployed to enable seamless coverage and ubiquitous access to the Internet. Accordingly, a mobile node often finds multiple APs nearby running on different channels. These channels have different congestion degrees. The quality of the links between the node and the APs also differs. Conventionally, RSSI is used as the metric for AP selection. This metric, despite its simplicity, may cause congestion when node distribution is biased. In this paper, we jointly consider the two key factors, channel congestion degree and link quality, and refine the potential throughput (PT) metric for AP selection. The PT is defined as the max throughput that can be achieved by a node if it exclusively occupies the remaining idle channel. In this way, a node can achieve higher throughput by associating with a farther but less used AP and the congestion of the network can be alleviated. The initial testbed experiments confirm the feasibility and the accuracy of measuring channel congestion degree via the off-the-shelf WLAN cards. The simulation results show that the PT metric can greatly improve the per-node throughput and the total throughput when nodes are unevenly distributed around APs.
2010-06-10