An AP Selection Scheme for Enhancement of Multimedia Streaming in Wireless Network Environments

Abstract

Recently, there has been a growing interest in the use of WLAN technology due to its easy deployment, flexibility and so on. Examples of WLAN applications range from standard internet services such as Web access to real-time services with strict latency/throughput requirements such as multimedia video and voice over IP on wireless network environments. Fair and efficient distribution of the traffic loads among APs(Access Points) has become an important issue for improved utilization of WLAN. This paper focuses on an AP selection scheme for achieving better load balance, and hence increasing network resource utilization for each user on wireless network environments. This scheme makes use of active scan patterns and the network delay as main parameters of load measurement and AP selection. This scheme attempts to estimate the AP traffic loads by observing the up/down delay and utilize the results to maximize the link resource efficiency through load balancing. We compared the proposed scheme with the original SNR(Signal to Noise Ratio)-based scheme using the NS-2(Network Simulation-2). We found that the proposed scheme improves the throughput by 12.5% and lower the network up/down link delay by 36.84% and 60.42%, respectively. All in all, the new scheme can significantly increase overall network throughput and reduce up/down delay while providing excellent quality for voice and video services.