A Load Balancing Technique for Wireless LANs

Abstract

Throughput maximization in a network is one of the major key challenges in wireless LANs (WLANs) and it could be achieved when the load of access points (APs) is balanced. The AP load in WLANs is very often found to be uneven. To overcome such imbalance of load, a load balancing technique have been proposed. The load balancing techniques commonly require proprietary software or hardware at the user side for controlling the user-AP association. 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 from the user side nor may any changes be required to the IEEE 802.11 standard [1]. It only requires the ability of dynamically changing the transmission power of the AP beacon messages. We develop a newer load balancing algorithm that will find the optimal beacon power settings which will thereon help to minimize the load of the most congested AP. The load may become shared and this may be performed with minimal delay and also maximized throughput is to be achieved. Keywords: Network throughput, Access points, WLAN, Beacon Messages, Load balancing, Throughput, Wireless LANs.