Wireless mesh network (WMN) has been proposed
to extend wireless coverage by using multi-hop communication to
enable network service for mobile devices via densely deployed
mesh APs. While modern wireless devices are capable of using
multiple WiFi interfaces, the Multipath TCP (MPTCP) protocol
has been employed to make full use of the capacity of multiple
radios. A key question of MPTCP communication in WMN is to
decide the best access point (AP) association for each wireless interface
to achieve maximum network performance. In this paper,
we propose an optimal AP association scheme based on goodput
measurement. We setup a wireless mesh testbed with densely
deployed APs to study the impact of signal strength and multi-hop
communication. We fit the measured data by a three-dimensional
surface, which shows that network goodput can be estimated
by a function of Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) and
hops. With the proposed estimation function, we formulate the
AP association problem as a mathematical optimization problem
and solve it by Integer Programming.We implement the proposed
strategy in the real deployed testbed and evaluate its performance
using MPTCP, which shows that it improves MPTCP goodput
significantly compared to several existing strategies.