Reassociation method based on top trading cycles for WLANs: Mechanism design approach

This paper proposes the flexible reassociation control scheme for wireless local area networks (WLANs) based on mechanism design theory. The notion of general preference in the theory enables us to formulate users' various kinds of preference (based on such as high throughput and/or low latency). The proposed scheme is guaranteed to provide a unique allocation of access points (APs) to STAs in each step with individual rationality and Pareto-optimality, so that no STA gets associated with a less preferable AP, and no allocation exists which is more preferable to all STAs. In addition, the iterative algorithm is adopted so that the proposed scheme is applicable to the case where each AP associates multiple STAs, while the original algorithm in the theory is not applicable to the case. The remarkable idea is that each AP trades a STA that has the poorest communication quality in some sense among STAs associated with the AP. Simulation results confirm the proposed scheme keeps the individual rationality and performs the throughput improvement with fairness.