Wi-Fi Seeker: A link and Load Aware AP Selection Algorithm

Abstract

The demand of mobile traffic increases tremendously as various Internet services are provided to mobile phones and computing devices, making mobile carriers increase the capacity of their cellular network. Since current cell towers and auxiliary devices cannot carry an excessive amount of traffic, several mobile carriers try to install low cost wireless equipment such as a Wi-Fi access point (AP) in order to offload overloaded traffic on cell towers. However, APs are installed randomly unlike cell towers because they can be installed by anyone and anywhere. The randomized allocation of APs incurs interference that causes serious degradation of wireless communication quality. Therefore, it is necessary to design mobile devices to use the environment or channel that contains the least interference for proper Wi-Fi communication. In order to make a mobile device experience the best wireless download quality, this paper proposes a novel AP selection mechanism that selects an AP that contains the least interference level compared to others with different number of communicating devices and amount of traffic load. The proposed selection mechanism does not require any additional feedback from nearby devices or APs. Performance evaluation was done by using real mobile devices with open source platform called Android.