Cell Breathing Techniques for Load Balancing in Wireless LANs
Top Cited Papers
- 27 February 2009
- journal article
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
- Vol. 8 (6), 735-749
- https://doi.org/10.1109/tmc.2009.50
Abstract
Maximizing network throughput while providing fairness is one of the key challenges in wireless LANs (WLANs). This goal is typically achieved when the load of access points (APs) is balanced. Recent studies on operational WLANs, however, have shown that AP load is often substantially uneven. To alleviate such imbalance of load, several load balancing schemes have been proposed. These schemes commonly require proprietary software or hardware at the user side for controlling the user-AP association. In this paper we present a new load balancing technique by controlling the size of WLAN cells (i.e., AP's coverage range), which is conceptually similar to cell breathing in cellular networks. The proposed scheme does not require any modification to the users neither the IEEE 802.11 standard. It only requires the ability of dynamically changing the transmission power of the AP beacon messages. We develop a set of polynomial time algorithms that find the optimal beacon power settings which minimize the load of the most congested AP. We also consider the problem of network-wide min-max load balancing. Simulation results show that the performance of the proposed method is comparable with or superior to the best existing association-based methods.Keywords
This publication has 16 references indexed in Scilit:
- Fairness and Load Balancing in Wireless LANs Using Association ControlIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 2007
- Measurement-Based Self Organization of Interfering 802.11 Wireless Access NetworksPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2007
- Cell Breathing in Wireless LANs: Algorithms and EvaluationIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 2006
- The Case for Non-Cooperative Multihoming of Users to Access Points in IEEE 802.11 WLANsPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2006
- Optimum Association of Mobile Wireless Devices with a WLAN-3G Access NetworkPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2006
- Characterizing mobility and network usage in a corporate wireless local-area networkPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,2003
- Fairness in routing and load balancingPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2003
- Resolving the CDMA cell breathing effect and near-far unfair access problem by bandwidth-space partitioningPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2002
- The coverage-capacity tradeoff in cellular CDMA systemsIEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 1999
- A sub-constant error-probability low-degree test, and a sub-constant error-probability PCP characterization of NPPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1997