A novel AP selection scheme in software defined networking enabled WLAN

In traditional IEEE 802.11 protocols, the RSSI is usually taken as the criterion for AP selection, by which the AP with the greatest signal strength may be heavily burdened. In this paper, A SDN-based AP selection scheme called TPR is proposed. Through centralized control from SDN controller which has a full view of the network, our TPR enables AP selection more reasonable and efficient. In addition, the OpenFlow protocol embedded in the AP firmware is revised to efficiently collect the measurement data for AP selection. Besides, since the data processing task is shifted to the SDN controller, the burden of each STA is greatly alleviated thus resulting in fewer energy consumption and overheads at STAs. Experimental results demonstrate the ability of our TPR to increase the throughput of the WLAN system in multi-AP scenario and to reduce the number of handoffs among different APs.