A New AP-Selection Strategy for High Density IEEE802.11 WLANs

Wireless local area networks are presently widely deployed so that different stations can potentially associate with an access point (AP). The AP selection strategy is one of the significant research areas for wireless local area networks. The selection strategy solves the relevant problem of which AP can be selected and associated with a station so that efficient resource utilization can be obtained. Rather than merely choosing the AP with the strongest received signal strength, however, we calculate the effective throughput for each neighboring AP and use the result as a basis for the AP selection. Referencing the throughput is better than referencing the signal strength because the network may contain a severe load imbalance. We performed computer simulations using the OPNET modeler in order to verify the performance of our scheme. The results show us that our proposed selection method outperforms the conventional one in terms of throughput.