Selecting a preferable access point with more available bandwidth

It is a common problem for Wireless LAN (WLAN) users when they face more than one available Access Point (AP): which one may serve them better? In the real world, most WLAN devices and users select the AP by Received Signal Strength (RSS), which doesn't consider the load of APs. Therefore, the RSS-based scheme may result in load imbalance and utilization degradation. This paper proposes a simple scheme to inform WLAN users the available bandwidth when selecting a specific AP. Unlike the previous work, the new scheme concerns about the aggregated traffic patterns in AP, which affects the amount of the available bandwidth. Considering the number of active stations and influence of collision, the available bandwidth is calculated and regarded as a selection metric. Common users can acquire this metric through Service Set IDentifier (SSID) without any modifications on their devices, and users who accept modifications can select the preferable AP dynamically and automatically. This scheme is very simple to be implemented and deployed with negligible overhead to network. We conduct simulations to verify this scheme, which can improve by 200% the user's throughput in some situations.