On the performance characteristics of WLANs: revisited
SIGMETRICS '05 Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
Improved access point selection
Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Mobile systems, applications and services
Using smart triggers for improved user performance in 802.11 wireless networks
Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Mobile systems, applications and services
Facilitating access point selection in IEEE 802.11 wireless networks
IMC '05 Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet Measurement
MDG: measurement-driven guidelines for 802.11 WLAN design
Proceedings of the 13th annual ACM international conference on Mobile computing and networking
Terminal-centric ap selection algorithm based on frame retransmissions
Proceedings of the 2nd ACM workshop on Performance monitoring and measurement of heterogeneous wireless and wired networks
SIP-based proactive and adaptive mobility management framework for heterogeneous networks
Journal of Network and Computer Applications
M2: using visible middleboxes to serve pro-active mobile-hosts
Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on Mobility in the evolving internet architecture
Wifi-reports: improving wireless network selection with collaboration
Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services
Cognitive network access using fuzzy decision making
IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
The impact of association on the capacity of WLANs
WiOPT'09 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad Hoc, and Wireless Networks
Traffic-aware decentralized AP selection for multi-rate in WLANs
ICACT'10 Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Advanced communication technology
Designing a practical access point association protocol
INFOCOM'10 Proceedings of the 29th conference on Information communications
Auto-configuration of 802.11n WLANs
Proceedings of the 6th International COnference
Measurement-driven guidelines for 802.11 WLAN design
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
Link quality analysis and measurement in wireless mesh networks
Ad Hoc Networks
WWIC'11 Proceedings of the 9th IFIP TC 6 international conference on Wired/wireless internet communications
OmniVoice: a mobile voice solution for small-scale enterprises
MobiHoc '11 Proceedings of the Twelfth ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing
ACORN: an auto-configuration framework for 802.11n WLANs
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
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The low price of commodity wireless LAN cards and access points (APs) has resulted in the rich proliferation of high density WLANs in enterprise, academic environments, and public spaces. In such environments wireless clients have a variety of affiliation options that ultimately determine the quality of service they receive from the network. The state of the art mechanism behind such a decision typically relies on received signal strength, associating clients to that access point (AP) in their neighborhood that features the strongest signal. More intelligent algorithms have been further proposed in the literature. In this work we take a step back and look into the fundamental metrics that determine end user throughput in 802.11 wireless networks. We identify three such metrics pertaining to wireless channel quality, AP capacity in the presence of interference, and client contention. We modify the low level software functionality (firmware and microcode) of a commercial wireless adaptor to measure the necessary quantities. We then test, in a real testbed, the ability of each metric to capture end user throughput through a range of diverse network conditions. Our experimental results indicate that user affiliation decisions should be based on metrics that do not only reflect physical layer performance, or network occupancy, but also concretely capture MAC layer behavior. Based on the acquired insight, we propose a new metric that is shown to be highly accurate across all tested network scenarios.