A Proactive, Terminal Based Best Access Point Selection Mechanism for Wireless LANs

Abstract

In IEEE802.11 WLAN networks, Radio Resource Management (RRM) is necessary for the efficient use of scarce radio resources and to balance the telecommunication traffic load, among all the Access Points (APs) of the infrastructure network. In these networks, the mobile station MS has the functionality to select an AP, based on specific criteria. A key challenge is how to achieve overall load balancing in the network, during the AP reselection procedure in a way that will achieve the optimum utilization of network resources. The conventional approaches typically use the strongest received signal from the side of MS (RX Level) as the criterion, without considering the traffic load of each AP. In this work, we present two easy to implement WLAN resource management mechanisms that are fully compatible with the existing standards and mechanisms already supported by IEEE802.11 networks.