Access Point Selection for Improving Throughput Fairness in Wireless LANs

We investigate the problem of access point selection in wireless LANs based on the IEEE 802.11 standard, when a station is within the vicinity of more than one access points. According to the proposed approach, the selection is based on the packet transmission delay for each access point that a station can associate to, which is related to the throughput that the station can achieve. Important features of the approach is that it considers the contention-based nature of IEEE 802.11´s MAC layer, it can be applied to the 802.11e standard which can support different classes in terms of the minimum contention window, and it can be implemented solely at the wireless stations, which passively monitor the activity of each access point´s channel, without requiring modifications to the access points. Experiments show that the proposed approach can achieve significantly higher throughput fairness compared to other approaches, without a significant decrease of the aggregate throughput.