Dependable public wireless LANs without hardware support

This paper presents a new approach for designing a fault-tolerant public wireless local access networks (public WLANs). When a failure occurs in an access point of the public WLAN, some users (the users under the coverage ranges of the faulty AP) cannot perform data services again due to losing wireless connectivity. To resume the wireless connectivity of such affected users, previous approaches are based on the hardware or network planning support. Unlike previous approach, the proposed approach gives each affected user a direction to guide it how to move itself to the coverage area of a survival access point. For quickly completing the wireless reconnection, the moving distance is an important concerned metric in the proposed approach. In addition, the overloading problem is also considered in the proposed approach for avoiding that many affected users move to the same survivable access point. Finally, extensive simulations are performed to evaluate the performance overhead of the proposed approach.