User Bandwidth Demand Centric Soft-Association Control in Wi-Fi Networks

Abstract

To address the challenge of unprecedented growth in mobile data traffic, ultra-dense network deployment is a cost efficient solution to offload the traffic over some small cells. The overlapped coverage areas of small cells create more than one candidate access points for one mobile user. Signal strength based user association in IEEE 802.11 results in a significantly unbalanced load distribution among access points. However, the effective bandwidth demand of each user actually differs vastly due to their different preferences for mobile applications. In this paper, we formulate a set of non-linear integer programming models for joint user association control and user demand guarantee problem. In this model, we are trying to maximize the system capacity and guarantee the effective bandwidth demand for each user by soft-association control with a software defined network controller. With the fact of NP-hard complexity of non-linear integer programming solver, we propose a Kernighan Lin Algorithm based graph-partitioning method for a large-scale network. Finally, we evaluated the performance of the proposed algorithm for the edge users with heterogeneous bandwidth demands and mobility scenarios. Simulation results show that the proposed adaptive soft-association control can achieve a better performance than the other two and improves the individual quality of user experience with a little price on system throughput.