A Game Theoretical Approach for Load Balancing User Association in 802.11 Wireless Networks

In the multi-cell IEEE 802.11 wireless networks, the traffic loads of access points(APs) are often uneven, which leads to inefficient use of network resources and unfair service to users. To alleviate such imbalance, different user association schemes have been proposed that use different metrics for measuring the congestion level of APs. In this paper, we propose a game theoretical model for the user association problem using the airtime cost as the congestion metric. The centralized and localized algorithms are designed for achieving the airtime- balancing Nash equilibrium. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms outperform the existing scheme in terms of fairness and load balance.