A Novel WiFi Throughput Estimation Method for WiFi Offloading In Heterogenous Network

摘要

WiFi offloading is becoming one of the key enablers to help the network operators dealing with the exponentially growing demand of mobile data. In the scenario with multiple Wi-Fi APs (Access Point) deployed at dense area, the right roaming and selection decision at the STA (STAtion) can improve user's experienced throughput and QoS. In addition, the conventional WiFi selection based on signal strength can result int suboptimal selection issues such as unbalancing or low utilization of APs. Therefore, in this paper, for enhancing the effectiveness of WiFi offloading and assisting STA to select preferable AP candiate, we propose a novel method to estimate the minimum offered throughputs of the surrounding APs before associating with the AP so that the STA can select the most preferable AP that provides highest throughput. Our proposed method is based on the channel resource utilization metric and the number of associated STA, which can be derived from the beacon of IEEE802.11u, k AP. The simulation result shows that the proposed method can achieve acceptable accuracy making it suitable for WiFi AP selection scheme.