A Semi-Matching Based Load Balancing Scheme for Dense IEEE 802.11 WLANs

A load balancing mechanism can adjust the load distribution among access points (APs) and improve resource utilization for dense wireless local area networks (WLANs). In this paper, we propose a semi-matching-based load balancing scheme for the IEEE 802.11 dense WLANs. The proposed scheme runs in a centralized controller. The controller judges whether the load is unevenly distributed according to the collected channel busy time ratio information of the entire network, and triggers the load balancing mechanism accordingly. In order to realize load balancing among APs and maximize the overall network throughput, we model the station to AP association problem as a weighted bipartite graph matching problem and find the optimal semi-matching using the Kuhn–Munkres (K-M) algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves performance improvement comparing with traditional schemes.

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