MACoD: Mobile Device-Centric Approach for Identifying Access Point Congestion

These days, since many mobile devices support Wi-Fi, the number of Wi-Fi hotspots are increasing. At the same time, the number of places where users can use wireless LAN are increasing. Unlike the cellular network, the traffic of wireless LAN may not be distributed evenly because there is no supervisor to control the network traffic. In addition, due to the low throughput and the high packet error rate in wireless communication, the network traffic may converge at some Access Points (APs) which take a role of connecting wired and wireless communication interfaces. Therefore, congestion can easily happen at APs in wireless LAN. However, received signal strength indicator (RSSI) frequently used does not mean the network state of AP, and existing sender-based congestion detection and control protocols cannot recognize accurately where the congestion occurs. Therefore, current mobile devices continuously use the connected AP even if it is congested after the association. In this paper, we propose MACoD, the low power AP congestion detection system for mobile devices, in order to resolve aforementioned problems. Furthermore, by conducting diverse simulations, actual experiments, and power consumption analysis, we validate that MACoD can detect congestion effectively and that it is suitable for mobile devices.