Cooperative Load Balancing in IEEE 802.11 Networks with Cell Breathing

Abstract

IEEE 802.11 WLANs (Wi-Fi) are widely deployed for providing Internet access in public spaces, known as Hot Spots. In these scenarios, users tend to be "gregarious” and essentially static. Since association and roaming decisions are made by client devices following signal strength criterions (i.e. a client station selects the AP that provides the strongest signal), the users and their load are unevenly distributed between neighboring APs. In this paper we propose a distributed algorithm with which the APs in an IEEE 802.11 WLAN are able to tune their cell size according to their load and also to their neighbor’s load. This technique improves the fairness and the performance levels and is known as Cell Breathing.