Load balancing through terminal based dynamic AP reselection for QoS in IEEE 802.11 networks

In this paper, a mechanism for supporting Quality of Service in wireless networks through the dynamic reselection of Access Points (APs) according to a terminal based load balancing scheme is presented. The mechanism is analyzed, and a corresponding implementation on laptops is presented, while evaluation through both simulation and actual field trials are included. Implementation refers to both Linux and MS OS systems. For the evaluation of the mechanism in the field trials, a very demanding streaming video scenario is selected, and the results are assessed with respect to the improvements that can be introduced in the end user Quality of Experience, even over state of the art streaming adaptation solutions.