Fuzzy Load Balancing for IEEE 802.11 Wireless Networks

AbstractWireless networks (WNs) are today used in many areas thanks to several benefits deriving from the ease of installation and maintenance and the high scalability. However, in large areas, the increasing number of nodes implies that Access Points (APs) are the main responsible of clients' connection. An overloaded access point may compromise requirements in terms of timeliness of data exchanged among the clients. This paper proposes a load balancing technique for IEEE 802.11 networks based on fuzzy logic in order to ensure the achievement of typical constraints that characterize a wireless scenario. To validate the goodness of the proposed approach several real test-bed scenarios were implemented and load distribution was evaluated

Controlled Matching Game for Resource Allocation and User Association in WLANs

In multi-rate IEEE 802.11 WLANs, the traditional user association based on the strongest received signal and the well known anomaly of the MAC protocol can lead to overloaded Access Points (APs), and poor or heterogeneous performance. Our goal is to propose an alternative game-theoretic approach for association. We model the joint resource allocation and user association as a matching game with complementarities and peer effects consisting of selfish players solely interested in their individual throughputs. Using recent game-theoretic results we first show that various resource sharing protocols actually fall in the scope of the set of stability-inducing resource allocation schemes. The game makes an extensive use of the Nash bargaining and some of its related properties that allow to control the incentives of the players. We show that the proposed mechanism can greatly improve the efficiency of 802.11 with heterogeneous nodes and reduce the negative impact of peer effects such as its MAC anomaly. The mechanism can be implemented as a virtual connectivity management layer to achieve efficient APs-user associations without modification of the MAC layer