A Mutil-Rate Access Point selection policy in IEEE 802.11 WLANs

In wireless local area networks (WLANs), there could be several available access points (APs) around a Station (STA). How to select the most appropriate AP among those available APs has become a hot research topic. The conventional selection policy, which selects one AP with the best RSSI, makes the loads among APs be distributed unevenly and degrades resource utilization rate. Recently, several AP selection mechanisms have been proposed, which can facilitate the load imbalance and improve the network performance. However, due to the effect of Mutil-Rate in IEEE 802.11a/b/g protocol, the accuracy of AP selection could be reduced. In this paper, we propose a Mutil Rate Access Point selection (MRAPS) policy, which not only considers overall received signal strength indication(RSSI), throughput and transmission rate, but also can be implemented easily. In addition, we perform computer simulations using the OPNET modeler in order to verify the performance of our scheme. The results show that our proposed selection policy outperforms the conventional policy.