Decentralized access point selection architecture for wireless LANs

Wireless LANs have been widely deployed, and multiple access points (APs) are likely to become much more available for wireless stations (STAs) which can roam from one AP to another by some rule. We focus on an efficient and fair way to use the wireless access resources provided by multiple APs. In particular, our major concern is to develop a decentralized way to enable each STA to select an appropriate available AP independently. A straightforward way is to select the AP with the strongest signal; however, this is shown to need further improvement. Hence, we propose decentralized AP selection strategies to achieve an efficient and fair share of wireless access resources, and evaluate them by simulations. The results show that the proposed strategies can attain an excellent throughput performance by use of the number of active STAs sharing each AP, even if STAs employ the strategies only when entering the wireless LAN. In addition, if STAs roam from one AP to another, the total throughput and fairness can be further improved very much.