Decentralized access point selection architecture for wireless LANs eployability and robustness

According to the spread of wireless LAN, multiple access points (AP) will be much more likely to be available there for stations (STA), which can roam from one AP to another by some rule. Consequently, the following significant issue can arise in those cases: how to select an appropriate AP among available AP. In the existing architecture, the received signal strength is usually used to select an AP. However, such an AP selection strategy causes the concentration of STA to specific AP and STA cannot use the resources of wireless LAN effectively. Hence, we propose decentralized AP selection strategies, and show that the proposed strategies can achieve an efficient and fair share of wireless access resources. Then, we examine deployability and robustness of our decentralized architecture from a practical viewpoint. The proposed architecture should be deployed without hurting the performance of the common existing architecture currently widely deployed. Therefore, the deployability of our architecture is examined in this respect. Furthermore, in addition to static characteristics, the dynamic behavior of the proposed architecture is studied to examine its robustness against some dynamic changes of situation due to AP breakdown and bursty arrivals of STA. Our simulation results show that the proposed architecture has excellent features in terms of both of deployability and robustness.