Fairness and Load Balancing in Wireless LANs Using Association Control
By Yigal Bejerano, Seung-Jae Han, Erran L. Li. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 2004
581 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The traffic load of wireless LANs is often unevenly distributed among the access points (APs), which results in unfair bandwidth allocation among users. We argue that the load imbalance and consequent unfair bandwidth allocation can be greatly reduced by intelligent association control. In this paper, we present an efficient solution to determine the user-AP associations for max-min fair bandwidth allocation. We show the strong correlation between fairness and load balancing, which enables us to use load balancing techniques for obtaining optimal max-min fair bandwidth allocation. As this problem is NP-hard, we devise algorithms that achieve constant-factor approximation. In our algorithms, we first compute a fractional association solution, in which 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 the integral solution from the fractional solution. We also consider time fairness and present a polynomial-time algorithm for optimal integral solution. We further extend our schemes for the on-line case where users may join and leave dynamically. Our simulations demonstrate that the proposed algorithms achieve close to optimal load balancing (i.e., max-min fairness) and they outperform commonly used heuristics.
Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/908dba63e69f1926b5f4c422c47cf5c01117df30
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Computer Networks and Communications
- Jeffrey G. Andrews
- Qiaoyang Ye
- Erran L. Li
- Athanasios V. Vasilakos
- Constantine Caramanis
- Yong Li
- Yudong Chen
- Ekram Hossain
In Electrical and Electronic Engineering
- Jeffrey G. Andrews
- Qiaoyang Ye
- Erran L. Li
- L. Su
- Athanasios V. Vasilakos
- Yong Niu
- Yong Li
- Depeng Jin
Citations in the corpus
- User Association for Load Balancing in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks (2012, background): “Indeed, there is considerable work investigating different utility functions, such as network-wide proportional fairness [19], network-wide maxmin fairness [20], maximization of network-wide aggregate utility by partial frequency reuse and load balancing [21], and α-optimal user association [22].”
- Measurement-Based Self Organization of Interfering 802.11 Wireless Access Networks (2007, unknown): “RELATED WORK Centralized algorithms for channel selection and user association are proposed in [3] and [4] respectively.”
- A survey of millimeter wave communications (mmWave) for 5G: opportunities and challenges (2015, background): “received signal strength indicator (RSSI) for user association, which may lead to inefficient use of resources [94– 96].”
- Joint Channel Assignment and Routing for Throughput Optimization in Multiradio Wireless Mesh Networks (2005, background): “Finally, fair bandwidth allocation and load balancing has been considered in single-radio wireless LAN context [6].”