Link-aware AP selection for improving Wi-Fi quality

The demand of mobile traffic increases tremendously as various Internet services are provided to mobile phones and computing devices, making mobile carriers to increase capacity of cellular network. Since current cell towers and auxiliary devices cannot carry excessive amount of traffic, several mobile carriers try to install low cost wireless equipments such as Wi-Fi access points (AP) so that some part of mobile traffic can be offloaded to these wireless nodes. Unlike cell towers, APs are installed randomly since there is no specific allocation policy for these license-exempt band equipment that are open to everyone. Since the randomized allocation of APs incur interference that causes serious degradation of wireless communication quality, it is necessary to design mobile devices to communicate in the environment or channel that contains the least interference. In order to make a mobile device experience the best wireless download quality, this paper proposes a novel AP selection mechanism that selects an AP that contains the least interference level compared to others with different number of communicating devices and amount of traffic load. Proposed selection mechanism does not require any additional feedback from nearby devices or APs. Performance evaluation is done by using real mobile devices with open source platform called Android.