Station-centric Access Point Selection Method for Heterogeneous Wi-Fi Environment

Wireless LAN access points (APs) and stations (STAs) are widespread. In such an environment, APs with different specifications, such as IEEE 802.11a and 802.11ac, or different settings, such as very high throughput technology, are simultaneously operated in proximity. In this paper, we propose a new STA-centric AP selection method that maximizes the throughput performance while achieving "airtime fairness" on all channels. In our proposed method, each STA dynamically adjusts the frame size based on its own transmission rate for achieving airtime fairness. Furthermore, the STA calculates the predicted throughput of all of available APs, and then selects the AP with the highest predicted throughput for improving the throughput performance. Through simulations, we demonstrated that each STA reliably connects to an AP with better throughput performance, thereby increasing the total throughput performance in a heterogeneous Wi-Fi environment.