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Abstract

In wireless local area networks often a station can potentially associate with more than one access point. Therefore, a relevant question is which access point to select "best" from a list of candidate ones. In IEEE 802.11, the user simply associates to the access point with the strongest received signal strength. However, this may result in a significant load imbalance between several access points. Moreover, the multi-rate flexibility provided by several IEEE 802.11 variants can cause low bit rate stations to negatively affect high bit rate ones and consequently degrade the overall network throughput. This paper investigates the various aspects of "best" access point selection for IEEE 802.11 systems. In detail, we first derive a new decision metric which can be used for AP selection. Using this metric we propose two new selection mechanisms which are decentralized in the sense that the decision is performed by each station, given appropriate status information of each access point. In fact, only few bytes of status information have to be added to the beacon and probe response frames which does not impose significant overhead. We show that our mechanism improves mean quality of service of all stations and better utilizes network resources compared to the conventional one implemented today in IEEE 802.11 devices. Also, the schemes are appealing in terms of stability and provide their performance improvement even for denser or lighter network configurations.

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The challenge to provide seamless mobility in the near future emerges as a key topic in various standardization bodies. This includes first of all the support of seamless handover between homogeneous networks. Distinct technologiessuch as IEEE 802.11WLANs (Wi-Fi) and IEEE 802.16 MANs WiMAX-have recently augmented such support to existing standards to enable seamless homogeneous handover. Cellular networks, in contrast, already included this inherently from the start. Currently considerable effort goes into coupling of different radio access technologies. Therefore, the second key topic in standardization is seamless heterogeneous handovers. IEEE, IETF, as well as 3GPP consider different approaches toward architectures and protocols enabling seamless mobility management. In this work, we discuss recent and on-going standardization activities within IEEE, IETF, and 3GPP toward seamless homogeneous as well as heterogeneous mobility support.