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Fairness and load balancing in wireless LANs using association control

Published: 26 September 2004 Publication History

Abstract

Recent studies on operational wireless LANs (WLANs) have shown that user load is often unevenly distributed among wireless access points (APs). This unbalanced load results in unfair bandwidth allocation among users. We observe that the unbalanced load and unfair bandwidth allocation can be greatly alleviated by intelligently associating users to APs, termed association control, rather than having users greedily associate APs of best received signal strength.In this study, we present an efficient algorithmic solution to determine the user-AP associations that ensure max-min fair bandwidth allocation. We provide a rigorous formulation of the association control problem that considers bandwidth constraints of both the wireless and backhaul links. Our formulation indicates the strong correlation between fairness and load balancing, which enables us to use load balancing techniques for obtaining near optimal max-min fair bandwidth allocation. Since this problem is NP-hard, we present algorithms that achieve a constant-factor approximate max-min fair bandwidth allocation. First, we calculate a fractional load balancing solution, where users can be associated with multiple APs simultaneously. This solution guarantees the fairest bandwidth allocation in terms of max-min fairness. Then, by utilizing a rounding method we obtain an efficient integral association. In particular, we provide a 2-approximation algorithm for unweighted greedy users and a 3-approximation algorithm for weighted and bounded-demand users. In addition to bandwidth fairness, we also consider time fairness and we show it can be solved optimally. We further extend our schemes for the on-line case where users may join and leave. Our simulations demonstrate that the proposed algorithms achieve close to optimal load balancing and max-min fairness and they outperform commonly used heuristic approaches.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      MobiCom '04: Proceedings of the 10th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking
      September 2004
      384 pages
      ISBN:1581138687
      DOI:10.1145/1023720
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 26 September 2004

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      Author Tags

      1. IEEE 802.11
      2. approximation algorithms
      3. load balancing
      4. max-min fairness
      5. wireless local area networks (WLAN)

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      • (2024)Joint downlink user association and interference avoidance with a load balancing approach in backhaul-constrained HetNetsPLOS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.029835219:3(e0298352)Online publication date: 4-Mar-2024
      • (2024)Load Balancing in O-RAN2024 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC)10.1109/WCNC57260.2024.10570553(1-6)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2024
      • (2023)Joint User Association and Wireless Scheduling with Smaller Time-Scale Rate Adaptation2023 21st International Symposium on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad Hoc, and Wireless Networks (WiOpt)10.23919/WiOpt58741.2023.10349840(223-230)Online publication date: 24-Aug-2023
      • (2023)Fuzzy Inference Systems for Load Balancing of Wireless Networks2023 IEEE 3rd International Maghreb Meeting of the Conference on Sciences and Techniques of Automatic Control and Computer Engineering (MI-STA)10.1109/MI-STA57575.2023.10169569(154-158)Online publication date: 21-May-2023
      • (2022)DARCAS: Dynamic Association Regulator Considering Airtime Over SDN-Enabled FrameworkIEEE Internet of Things Journal10.1109/JIOT.2022.31760109:20(20719-20732)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2022
      • (2022)ML-Based Handover Prediction and AP Selection in Cognitive Wi-Fi NetworksJournal of Network and Systems Management10.1007/s10922-022-09684-230:4Online publication date: 25-Aug-2022
      • (2021)Association Control for User Centric Millimeter Wave Communication SystemsIEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology10.1109/TVT.2021.311347070:11(12001-12012)Online publication date: Nov-2021
      • (2021)Stability Analysis of Simple and Online User Association Policies for Millimeter Wave NetworksIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2021.30743739(62405-62429)Online publication date: 2021
      • (2021)WiMCA: multi-indicator client association in software-defined Wi-Fi networksWireless Networks10.1007/s11276-021-02636-9Online publication date: 13-May-2021
      • (2020)Joint Client Association and Random Access Control for MU-MIMO WLANsIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2019.293519719:12(2818-2832)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2020
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