Potential throughput based access point selection

Mobile nodes in wireless LANs connect themselves to the Internet via their associated access points (AP). Although more and more APs are being deployed, nodes tend to gather around some common hotspots, contending for few APs and leaving other APs idle. The traffic unbalance affects both per-node throughput and network throughput. In this paper, we aim to solve this problem by AP selection. We jointly consider the two key factors—channel availability and link quality—that determine the achievable throughput of a node, and suggest the potential throughput (PT) metric for AP selection. The PT metric is defined as the maximal throughput that can be achieved by a node if it exclusively occupies the remaining idle channel. In this way, a node can achieve higher throughput by associating with a farther but less used AP and the congestion of the network can be alleviated. The simulation results show that the PT metric can greatly improve the total throughput when nodes are unevenly distributed around APs. The testbed experiments with the off-the-shelf WLAN cards also confirm that the per-node throughput can be effectively improved with the proposed method.