Improving Access Point Association Protocols through Channel Utilization and Adaptive Switching

In this paper, we propose a distributed access point selection scheme by which nodes select an appropriate access point to associate with based on each individual device's channel utilization. We define channel utilization as the ratio of required bandwidth to estimated available bandwidth. By incorporating channel utilization into the access point association protocol, we can effectively reduce unnecessary reassociations and improve upper layer performance such as throughput and packet delivery delay. We have further enhanced our association protocol by using adaptive switching to schedule the switching to neighboring access points (APs), ultimately bringing down the association overhead. When channel utilization is combined with adaptive switching, we observe a significant performance improvement compared to traditional association approaches.