Design and implementation of access point selection mechanism in IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network

Abstract

Recent growth in Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) usage has generated considerable interest in the -establishment of the IEEE 802.11 WLAN standards. WLAN has been developed with the capability to handle tremendous growth of data traffic and therefore have been proliferating worldwide. The influencing factors and the parameters involved prior choosing which access point (AP) to connect with are to be carefully evaluated and dealt with in the process of WLAN deployment. Properly designed selection mechanisms that able to provide not only radio coverage but also a good internet connection speed are in turn expected to be able to improve the Quality of Service (QoS). In this dissertation, a new approach for the AP selection in IEEE 802.11 is proposed. The new technique takes into account internet connection speed in contrast to the classic approach that solely based on the Received Signal Strength (RSS). Four heuristic selection models were developed namely Successive Selection, Comparative Selection, Evaluative Selection and Predictive Selection with the later offers significant improvement over the other. Each model was designed and developed using LINUX Bash script programming whilst the internet connection speed test was ran by means of PHP script. The results for each model were evaluated respectively to see the variation in selection pattern when compared to the default selection algorithm. The time interval during the scanning and selection process was also analysed in the investigation to further identify the performance of each model. The enhancement reaped from the developed selection algorithm is expected to bring benefit to different user at various places with diverse requirements.