Sung Hoon Seo , Jae Jong Baek , Dong Gun Kim , Joo Seok Song

KIPS Transactions on Computer and Communication Systems, Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 187-194, Jun. 2011
10.3745/KIPSTC.2011.18.3.187,   PDF Download:

Abstract

IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN has become the center of attention for one of the most dominant wireless networking technologies nowadays. In densely deployed wireless LANs, mobile stations are exposed to a number of AP, thus it is needed to select the best AP to associate with. The most common approach is to select the AP with the highest received signal strength. However it does not consider traffic load imposed to each AP so that it may cause the poor network performance. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a throughput estimation scheme for neighboring APs by sniffing the traffic within 802.11 networks. We devise a tool, named "VirtFrame", which is to estimate the station`s capable throughput from neighbor APs based on the channel access time by virtually combining the sniffed frames. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme well matches that there exists correlation between the channel access time and the actual throughput of the APs.

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