Practical Design of Load-Aware Seamless Steering in Wi-Fi Networks

In this letter, we propose a standard-compliant access point (AP) steering solution for commodity Wi-Fi that enables seamless steering of ongoing data sessions. We identify a ping-pong phenomenon caused by relying on AP-broadcasted channel utilization for steering. Our solution introduces a nondisruptive capacity room metric, which considers both signal strength and channel utilization to evaluate candidate APs for steering. A key feature of our solution is self-load estimation, enabling accurate channel load assessment and mitigating ping-pong effects. We prototype the proposed solution on commodity Wi-Fi APs and conduct testbed experiments using unmodified commercial Wi-Fi clients. Our evaluation demonstrates significant performance gains over benchmark schemes, including an open-source solution, achieving up to 3.2 × higher throughput.