A CAPWAP based Access Point Selection in 802.11 Wireless LANs
Liu Zhihong -, Liu Ya-ping, Xiaozhe Zhang, Gong Zhenghu -, Chen Rongmao - · International Journal of Digital Content Technology and its Applications · 2012
Network access in wireless local area network is usually accomplished by selecting a nearby AP to associate with, which is determined only based on the RSSI in 802.11 standards. This selection policy would cause the loads among APs unevenly distribute and resource utilization degrade. Therefore, How to select the most appropriate one among available APs has become a hot research topic. Besides, with the increasing scale of deployment of AP, a novel management solution, Fit AP Architecture, has been proposed, which can simplify functionalities in management. In allusion to this novel architecture, we propose a CAPWAP based Access Point Selection (CAPS), which extends CAPWAP protocol smoothly and controls the association of STAs in a centralized way. In addition, we perform experiment simulation using the OPNET modeler in order to verify the performance of our scheme. The results show that our proposed selection policy outperforms the RSSI based one.