Journal of Applied Science and Engineering

Published by Tamkang University Press

1.30

Impact Factor

1.60

CiteScore

Shiann-Tsong Sheu1 and Chih-Chiang Wu1

1Department of Electrical Engineering Tamkang University Tamsui,251, Taiwan, R.O.C.


 

Received: January 26, 1999
Accepted: March 5, 1999
Publication Date: March 5, 1999

Download Citation: ||https://doi.org/10.6180/jase.1999.2.1.06  


ABSTRACT


In an infrastructure wireless LAN, the access point (AP) is responsible for connecting mobile stations (STA) and wired stations. Each access point is assigned on one channel. Traditionally, one station selects AP to connect is based on the received signal strength indicator (RSSI). This approach may cause all active mobile stations to connect to few APs and lots of contentions/collisions will occur by the Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) protocol. Consequently, the total network throughput will be degraded. Contrarily, if all STAs can be equally distributed to all APs and the signal strength of any pair of STA and connected AP is still kept in an acceptable range, the spare bandwidth in wireless LAN (WLAN) will be utilized in a more efficient way. In this paper, a novel dynamic load balance algorithm is proposed for WLAN. Simulation results show the proposed algorithm has the ability to fairly distribute all STAs among APs. Moreover, it also maximizes the average RSSI between AP and connected STAs.


Keywords: AP, CSMA/CA, Infrastructure, RSSI, STA, WLAN


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