Quality of Service Oriented Access Point Selection Framework for Large Wi-Fi Networks

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of access point (AP) selection in large Wi-Fi networks. Unlike current solutions that rely on received signal strength to determine the best AP that could serve a wireless user's request, we propose a novel framework that considers the quality of service (QoS) requirements of the user's data flow. The proposed framework relies on a function reflecting the suitability of a Wi-Fi AP to satisfy the QoS requirements of the data flow. The framework takes advantage of the flexibility and centralised nature of software defined networking (SDN). A performance comparison of this algorithm developed through an SDN-based simulator shows significant achievements against other state-of-the-art solutions in terms of provided QoS and improved wireless network capacity.