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.