Implementation of connection management scheme of mobile stations in IEEE 802.11 WLAN APs considering transmission power control

Recently, in order to satisfy increasing demands for wireless resources, WLAN access points (APs) have been extensively deployed. As APs are densely placed, several problems, such as co-channel interference and load imbalance among APs, are introduced. Transmission power control of AP is considered as one of the techniques which can resolve the problems. However, if APs decrease their transmission power according to TPC policy, mobile stations (STAs) which are not located in the reduced communication region served by those APs are suddenly disconnected from their serving APs. This may degrade system performance. In order to alleviate the degradation of system performance, we propose connection management scheme for STAs expected to be disconnected after the power control of APs. The proposed scheme can improve data rate of the STAs by reconnecting them to neighbor APs which can offer the highest data rate. Moreover, in order to evaluate performance of proposed and conventional connection management scheme, we constructed testbed consisting of WLANs.