A Novel Association Policy for Web Browsing in a Multirate WLAN

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new association policy for WLANs that optimizes web browsing performance by considering TCP-controlled downloads and varying user rates, demonstrating significant improvements over existing policies.

Contribution

It presents the first association policy tailored specifically for web browsing, combining analytical models and a novel delay-based approach to improve user experience.

Findings

EDA policy reduces download times by up to 46.4%

Analytical models accurately predict throughput and delay

Policy outperforms existing association strategies in simulations

Abstract

We obtain an association policy for STAs in an IEEE 802.11 WLAN by taking into account explicitly two aspects of practical importance: (a) TCP-controlled short file downloads interspersed with read times (motivated by web browsing), and (b) different STAs associated with an AP at possibly different rates (depending on distance from the AP). Our approach is based on two steps. First, we consider an analytical model to obtain the aggregate AP throughput for long TCP-controlled file downloads when STAs are associated at k different rates r1, r2, : : :, rk; this extends earlier work in the literature. Second, we present a 2-node closed queueing network model to approximate the expected average-sized file download time for a user who shares the AP with other users associated at a multiplicity of rates. These analytical results motivate the proposed association policy, called the Estimated Delay based Association (EDA) policy: Associate with the AP at which the expected file download time is the least. Simulations indicate that for a web-browsing type traffic scenario, EDA outperforms other policies that have been proposed earlier; the extent of improvement ranges from 12.8% to 46.4% for a 9-AP network. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that proposes an association policy tailored specifically for web browsing. Apart from this, our analytical results could be of independent interest