Abstract
Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) provide high-bandwidth wireless access, which makes it capable for multimedia services. A user in a WMN may be covered by multiple APs, while it should be associated with only one to access the Internet. Conventional IEEE 802.11 user-AP association mechanism for WLANs employs signal strength as the sole metric. However, this may lead to network congestion and performance degradation in multi-hop networks such as WMNs, especially for multimedia services that require a large bandwidth and a low latency. Thus AP association in WMNs becomes an important research issue. In this paper we propose a novel AP association approach LBAA, taking AP’s load-balancing, WMN’s multi-hop characteristic, and user’s RSSI into consideration. We first propose a centralized algorithm and then extend it to a distributed one, with the latter one more practical and convenient for deployment. Network throughput and max–min user fairness are improved by LBAA. Performance evaluation demonstrating the benefits of our approach is given through a series of experiments in terms of collision probability, access bandwidth, end-to-end throughput, and average RSSI.
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Cui, Y., Ma, T., Liu, J. et al. Load-balanced AP association in multi-hop wireless mesh networks. J Supercomput 65, 383–409 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-010-0519-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-010-0519-7