A Study On Access Point Selection Schemes In Wireless Lan

In recent years, Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) are widely deployed everywhere due to low-cost and easy installation. Selecting the best access point is the major research problem. The stations in the network should get associated with the suitable Access Points (AP) that result in higher throughput. In IEEE 802.11 wireless networks, the simple association strategy is to get associated to the AP with the strongest Received Signel Strength Indication (RSSI) value, which may cause load imbalance and eventually traffic overhead. Also, this strategy may not result in effective throughput as it does not consider the other parameters like channel conditions, traffic type, access point load. Several other strategies that use decision metrics like load information, position of AP, potential bandwidth, round trip time have been proposed after a long research work, but has failed in perfect association with an access point. Thus, access point selection is still a critical problem. A new metric or combination of metrics has to be derived that facilitates the effective selection of an AP, that maximizes the throughput. This paper presents the existing AP selection strategies in the context of WLAN. This paper also provides directions to design the metrics of AP selection method in a WLAN.