A New Method of User Association in Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

The IEEE 802.11 based wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are becoming the promising technology to provide last-mile broadband Internet access to the users. In order to access the Internet through the pre-deployed WMN, the user has to associate with one of the access points (APs) present in the network. In WMN, it is very common that the user device can have multiple APs in its vicinity. Since the user performance majorly depends on the associated AP, how to select the best AP is always remaining as a challenging research problem in WMN. The traditional method of AP selection is based on received signal strength (RSS) and it is proven inefficient in the literature as the method does not consider AP load, channel conditions, etc. This paper proposes a new method of user association in WMN such that the user selects the AP based on achievable end-to-end throughput measured in the presence of other interfering APs. The proposed association metric is independent of routing protocol and routing metric used in WMN. The simulation results show that our method outperforms the RSS based AP selection method in WMN.