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Blair,

Two things that must be considered are capacity and coverage. RSSI addresses coverage, load balancing addresses capacity.

Client stations make a decision on when to associate or reassociate. The way they make those decisions is different based on the vendor, but the association process requires the client station to make the decision. This includes making decisions on load balancing.

The standard does not specify how to do load balancing, but does make available reserved fields that vendors use to provide proprietary load balancing solutions. In order for the solution to work, the access point will transmit information in a reserved field regarding, for example, the number of client stations already associated. The client must know to look for and then interpret the information transmitted by co-located access points and then make a decision on which access point for which to associate.

Hope this helps.