Link quality based association mechanism in IEEE 802.11h compliant wireless LANs

When deploying IEEE 802.11 LANs, it is important from the performance perspective to associate the users to the available access points in an efficient way. The efficiency of an association relates to the average rates that the users can achieve with the particular association. Current implementations of 802.11 LANs do not take into account physical channel information in making association decisions. This usually results in much lower user rates than what can be ideally achieved. In this paper, we propose a new user association control framework for infrastructure-based wireless LANs compliant with the IEEE 802.11h specification in light of these issues. By using the new information that is implicitly provided by 802.11h specifications, our framework, takes into account the channel conditions when associating stations with the access points. Simulation results show that the proposed schemes improve the throughput of the network, compared with the static allocation without channel quality information. This improvement is significant, especially in an environment where external interference is present.