A MAC protocol for multihomed WLANs

Abstract

In many cases, a mobile user has the option of connecting to one of several 802.11 access point (APs). We consider the case when users multihome, i.e., split their traffic among all available APs, based on the long-term channel characteristics such as burstiness and packet error rate. This type of operation requires a new multi-access control (MAC) protocol, where the user has to decide to which AP the packet is forwarded. In this paper we propose a new MAC protocol for multihomed users and the selection of the AP for each packet is performed in our proposed MAC protocol based on the most recent channel observation and the collected long-term statistics, where the aim is to maximize the probability of successful transmission of each packet. The proposed MAC protocol is analyzed using Qualnet network simulator, and it is shown that our proposed protocol can improve the efficiency of the system significantly compared to the standard 802.11 protocol where each user is associated with the AP that has the maximum received signal strength.