Localized Access Point Selection in Infrastructure Wireless LAN

The poor performance of the current access point (AP) selection schemes in infrastructure WLANs motivated intensive studies to balance loads among APs. In this paper, we model the AP selection problem as the matching problem in the bipartite graph. Our objective is to maximize the total load among all APs. We propose a class of localized heuristics based on different user knowledge models. For some of these localized heuristics, we prove that there exists a constant approximation ratio in terms of expected total load through both mathematical analysis and simulations.