Achieving Load Balancing in High-Density Software Defined WiFi Networks

In high-density WiFi networks, load balancing is important to improve network utilization and ensure fairness in terms of network usage among end-users. However, load balancing is difficult to achieve in traditional WiFi networks. The emerging software defined network (SDN) architecture is advantageous to achieve measurable, manageable and controllable high-density WiFi networks. In this paper, we propose a load balancing scheme for SD-WiFi networks, which jointly considers the overload problem and the hand-over process. We constructed an emulation platform and a low-cost prototype testbed for high-density WiFi networks to evaluate our load-balancing scheme. Our comparative experiments were conducted with the same settings using the emulation tool and the testbed. The proposed scheme outperforms the default settings and three previous schemes including a load-aware access scheme, an adaptive load-balancing scheme, and a load-aware handoff scheme, in achieving the best trade-off between network throughput and network fairness.