A simple metric that correlates with public Wi‐Fi throughput

Abstract In the IEEE 802.11 specifications, a wireless fidelity (Wi‐Fi) access point (AP) broadcasts a beacon frame every 0.1024 s, and the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) is measured at a user terminal. RSSI is used as a metric for AP selection, but it does unlikely correlate with the actual quality of service, as has been pointed out in previous literature. In this letter, a simple metric is proposed that correlates with the effective throughput offered by a public Wi‐Fi AP. Specifically, the number of beacon frames within a time window is counted instead of using RSSI. The proposed metric can be easily calculated as it does not rely on advanced techniques such as machine learning. In a realistic IEEE 802.11a/n/ac network, the correlation coefficient between the proposed metric and the effective total throughput is 0.874 in the time window of 1 s, which is higher than a conventional metric, indicating the potential for low‐latency identification of whether a public Wi‐Fi AP can provide good throughput.