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Coverage adjustment for load balancing with an AP service availability guarantee in WLANs

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Abstract

In wireless local area networks, adjusting the coverage of access points (APs) may force the clients near the coverage boundaries of congested APs to associate with lightly-loaded ones, thus realizing load-balancing. Such an approach has the advantage of requiring no modification on the client software/hardware compared to other load-balancing techniques. However, its applicability is undermined by the problems of AP service cheating and AP service loophole resulted from coverage adjustment, which significantly affect the AP service availability. Nevertheless, these two problems are largely ignored by the existent research. To tackle this challenge, a variable polyhedron genetic algorithm (GA) is proposed, which not only provides an AP service availability guarantee but also yields a near-optimal beacon range for each AP when the number of evolutions is large enough. Simulation study indicates that our algorithm is superior over the default 802.11 AP association model in terms of load-balancing and network throughput enhancement. In addition, the variable polyhedron GA outperforms the traditional GA in terms of fitness value and convergence speed.

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Notes

  1. Here “simultaneously” means multiple clients access the wireless media at the beginning of a time slot in a CSMA-based WLAN network.

  2. In this study, we choose to employ a disk-shaped coverage for each AP because it is a good approximation of an AP’s coverage: WiFi signals can penetrate walls and other barriers without much difficulty, which justifies why many relevant research adopts the same assumption of disk-shaped coverage [7, 20].

  3. Actually, our algorithm is applicable to a more general case where R could have any shape.

  4. Algorithm 2 simply enforces the three conditions outlined in Sect. 4.2 by enlarging the BRs of some APs to provide full BR coverage conditioned on the full TR coverage. Similarly, it can be used to enlarge the TRs of some APs to obtain a full TR coverage, assuming that maximum data powers provide a full TR coverage.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61272475 and No.61003225), and the National Science Foundation of the US (CNS-0831852).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Shengling Wang

  2. Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Shengling Wang

  3. IBM, Beijing, China

    Jianhui Huang

  4. Department of Computer Science, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA

    Xiuzhen Cheng

  5. Department of Computer Information Science, University of Macau, Macao, People’s Republic of China

    Xiuzhen Cheng & Biao Chen

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  1. Shengling Wang
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  2. Jianhui Huang
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  3. Xiuzhen Cheng
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  4. Biao Chen
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Correspondence to Xiuzhen Cheng.

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Wang, S., Huang, J., Cheng, X. et al. Coverage adjustment for load balancing with an AP service availability guarantee in WLANs. Wireless Netw 20, 475–491 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-013-0615-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-013-0615-8

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