Improving performance of wireless mesh networks through user association method

Abstract

IEEE 802.11-based wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are emerging as the promising technology to provide last-mile broadband Internet access. A WMN is composed of mesh clients (MCs) and mesh access points (MAPs). A mesh client has to associate with one of the MAPs in order to access the network. Since the client performance depends on the selected MAP, how to select a best MAP is an open research problem. The traditional association mechanism used in WLAN, is based on received signal strength (RSS) which received criticism in the literature as it does not consider many important factors such as access point load, channel conditions, medium contention, etc. This paper proposes a novel scheme of MAP selection in WMNs. The basic idea is to reduce the negative impact of low throughput clients over high throughput clients. The performance of our scheme is evaluated through simulations and we show that our scheme performs better than RSS-based association scheme.