Throughput Enhancement for WDS-Based WLANs

A wireless distribution system (WDS)-based wireless local area network (WLAN) is composed of a base access point (AP) which is connected to wired line and one or more linked APs which are connected to the base AP or other linked APs via wireless links. Usually, WLAN stations try to associate with an AP from which the stations receive the strongest signal strength. However, in WDS-based WLANs, the base AP may provide higher throughput than linked APs although the signal strength of base AP is weaker than those of linked APs. In this paper, we propose a new medium access scheme in which each station uses an AP that can provide the highest throughput to improve the capacity of WDS-based WLANs. To implement the proposed scheme, no modification is required to stations, while some modifications are required to APs. Our experiment and simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves improved throughput performance over existing schemes.