Maximizing Bandwidth Utilization by Sharing Method of SSID Hiding in Multiple Wireless Routers

Abstract

A wireless router is a device which allows several wireless clients to share an internet line using NAT (Network Address Translation). In a school or a small office environment where many clients use multiple wireless routers, a client may select any one of wireless routers so that most clients can be clustered to a small set of the wireless routers. In such a case, there exists load unbalancing problem between clients and wireless routers. One of its result is that clients using the busiest router get poor service. The other is that the resource utilization of the whole wireless routers becomes very low.In order to resolve the problems, we propose a load sharing scheme to maximize network bandwidth utilization based on SSID(Service Set IDentifier) hiding. The proposed scheme keeps checking the available bandwidth of all the possible wireless routers in a time interval and select the most available one. If a new client appears, the most available router is visible to him or her whereas the others are not visible. This is handled by SSID hiding in the proposed scheme. We implemented the proposed scheme with ASUS WL 500G wireless router and performed experiments. Experimental results show the bandwidth utilization improvement compared to the existing method.