Network-Leading Association Scheme in IEEE 802.11 Wireless Mesh Networks

The association policy in current IEEE 802.11 networks usually considers Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI) to be the only metric to capture access link quality. However, when a Mesh Client (MC) in IEEE 802.11-based Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) needs to be associated with the most appropriate Mesh Access Point (MAP), the quality of both the access link and the routing path in mesh backhaul should be considered. To take into account this requirement, most existing approaches rely on MAPs to provide more information for MCs such as traffic load, routing metric, airtime cost, etc. These solutions inevitably need to modify the IEEE 802.11 standard or wireless interface drivers on both MAPs and MCs, which is not feasible or flexible in actual deployment. In this paper, a network-leading association scheme is proposed for IEEE 802.11 WMNs. It is completely operated by MAPs and does not require any modification on MCs. It also adapts to the dynamic network environment and always selects the best MAP to serve an MC. Simulation results on ns-3 platform indicate that the network-leading association scheme remarkably improves the performance of IEEE 802.11 WMNs as compared with the existing approaches.