Wireless Communications: Principles and Practice
Wireless Communications: Principles and Practice
Fixing 802.11 access point selection
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
Goodput Analysis and Link Adaptation for IEEE 802.11a Wireless LANs
IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
End-to-end available bandwidth: measurement methodology, dynamics, and relation with TCP throughput
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
Bandwidth estimation in broadband access networks
Proceedings of the 4th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement
Horde: separating network striping policy from mechanism
Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services
Improved access point selection
Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Mobile systems, applications and services
Cell Breathing in Wireless LANs: Algorithms and Evaluation
IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
Time-based fairness improves performance in multi-rate WLANs
ATEC '04 Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
Facilitating access point selection in IEEE 802.11 wireless networks
IMC '05 Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet Measurement
Fairness and load balancing in wireless LANs using association control
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
Designing high performance enterprise Wi-Fi networks
NSDI'08 Proceedings of the 5th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation
FatVAP: aggregating AP backhaul capacity to maximize throughput
NSDI'08 Proceedings of the 5th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation
Approximate optimization for proportional fair AP association in multi-rate WLANs
WASA'10 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Wireless algorithms, systems, and applications
Effective capacity: a wireless link model for support of quality of service
IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
Performance analysis of the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
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The coverage area of Access Points (APs) in Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) often overlaps considerably. Hence, a station can potentially associate with many APs. In traditional IEEE 802.11 systems, the station associates to the AP with the strongest signal. This strategy may result in load imbalance between APs and thus low overall network throughput. This paper proposes a new mechanism for selecting the ''best'' AP based on a novel available bandwidth estimation scheme. The available bandwidth provided by an AP depends mainly on the signal quality and the load on the wireless channel. Based on measurements we first analyze how those factors vary stochastically over time and motivate why a frequent estimation of available bandwidth is necessary. We then develop BEST-AP, a system for Bandwidth ESTimation of Access Points, which uses regular data traffic to estimate the available bandwidth from all APs in reach in a non-intrusive way, even if they are on a different channel. Based on OpenFlow, BEST-AP allows the station to be associated with multiple APs simultaneously and to switch between APs with low overhead. Using the available bandwidth estimates, the system exploits the ''best'' AP for longer duration while probing the less good APs for shorter durations to update the bandwidth estimations. The evaluation in a WLAN testbed shows that with background load created from real WLAN traces, the dynamic selection of APs improves the throughput of a station by around 81%, compared to a static selection. When the station is mobile, the throughput increases by 176% on average.