A Novel On-Line Association Algorithm for Supporting Load Balancing in Multiple-AP Wireless LAN

Nowadays, wireless LAN has become the most widely deployed technology in mobile devices for providing Internet access. Operators and service providers remarkably increase the density of wireless access points in order to provide their subscribers with better connectivity and user experience. As a result, WLAN users usually find themselves covered by multiple access points and have to decide which one to associate with. In traditional implementations, most wireless stations would select the access point with the strongest signal, regardless of traffic load on that access point, which might result in heavy congestion and unfair load. In this paper, we propose a novel on-line association algorithm to deal with any sequence of STAs during a long-term time such as one day. the performance of our algorithm is evaluated through simulation and experiments. Simulation results show that our algorithm improves the overall WLAN throughput by up to 37%, compared with the conventional RSSI-based approach. Our algorithm also performs better than SSF (Strongest Signal First) and LAB (Largest Available Bandwidth) in the experiments.

[1]  Jie Wu,et al.  Designing a Practical Access Point Association Protocol , 2010, 2010 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM.

[2]  Seung-Jae Han,et al.  Fairness and Load Balancing in Wireless LANs Using Association Control , 2004, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

[3]  Michael Bredel,et al.  Understanding Fairness and its Impact on Quality of Service in IEEE 802.11 , 2008, IEEE INFOCOM 2009.

[4]  Yan He,et al.  Design and Implementation of CLASS: A Cross-Layer ASSociation Scheme for Wireless Mesh Networks , 2010 .

[5]  Mznah Al-Rodhaan,et al.  AP Association for Proportional Fairness in Multirate WLANs , 2014, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

[6]  Wei Cheng,et al.  Maximizing throughput when achieving time fairness in multi-rate wireless LANs , 2012, 2012 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM.

[7]  Li-Hsing Yen,et al.  Stability and Fairness of AP Selection Games in IEEE 802.11 Access Networks , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology.

[8]  Leandros Tassiulas,et al.  Contention and traffic load-aware association in IEEE 802.11 WLANs: Algorithms and implementation , 2011, 2011 International Symposium of Modeling and Optimization of Mobile, Ad Hoc, and Wireless Networks.

[9]  Andrzej Duda,et al.  A Novel Access Method for Supporting Absolute and Proportional Priorities in 802.11 WLANs , 2008, IEEE INFOCOM 2008 - The 27th Conference on Computer Communications.

[10]  Aranyak Mehta,et al.  AdWords and generalized on-line matching , 2005, 46th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS'05).

[11]  Rose Qingyang Hu,et al.  On the optimal mobile association in heterogeneous wireless relay networks , 2012, 2012 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM.

[12]  Thierry Turletti,et al.  A survey of QoS enhancements for IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN , 2004, Wirel. Commun. Mob. Comput..

[13]  Yang Richard Yang,et al.  Proportional Fairness in Multi-Rate Wireless LANs , 2008, IEEE INFOCOM 2008 - The 27th Conference on Computer Communications.

[14]  Jie Wu,et al.  Achieving efficiency and fairness for association control in vehicular networks , 2009, 2009 17th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols.

[15]  Gustavo de Veciana,et al.  alpha-Optimal User Association and Cell Load Balancing in Wireless Networks , 2010, 2010 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM.

[16]  Yuanyuan Yang,et al.  AP association in 802.11n WLANs with heterogeneous clients , 2012, 2012 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM.

[17]  N. Papaoulakis,et al.  A Proactive, Terminal Based Best Access Point Selection Mechanism for Wireless LANs , 2008, 2008 IEEE Globecom Workshops.