Fairness and Load Balancing in SDWN Using Handoff-Delay-Based Association Control and Load Monitoring

Traffic loads in any 802.11 WLAN are distributed unevenly. This imbalance implies that some access points (APs) suffer from traffic congestions, while others are underutilized. The unbalanced load distributions cause annoying packet delay and throughput degradation which is unacceptable in current and future networks. A load-balancing algorithm should solve two challenges. The first is to accurately identify the APs' loads to timely find traffic imbalances. And the second is to associate clients with APs to achieve optimal proportional fairness intelligently. Network metrics such as throughput, delay, jitter, and client amount cannot be used individually to accurately identify APs' loads, because of the complexities of wireless communications. Which metrics to use and how to combine those network metrics to represent AP load are controversial. For intelligent association control, handoff delay (time to move a station from an AP to another) may last for 6 seconds. If the algorithm designers do not consider this delay in their optimization processes, unnecessary re-associations generated in their algorithm will offset the optimization profits. In this paper, we propose novel learning-based methods to monitor the network load to discover real-time load unbalances. We also model the load balancing problem as a utility maximization problem in which costs caused by handoff delay are considered. Then we utilize discretized linear programming theory and general assignment problem theory to solve it. We also compute the approximation ratio of our algorithm. We implement the whole load balancing system and evaluate the performances which show that our method outperforms a state-of-art algorithm in terms of throughput by up to12.7%, and it outperforms the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) based method by up to 28.13%.