A joint approach to bandwidth allocation and AP-client association for WLANs

Recent empirical studies have shown that clients gather together in popular locations, which results in load-imbalance, in a network. One of the key wireless LANs (WLANs) challenges is alleviating the load-imbalance while maximizing the bandwidth utilization. However, the IEEE 802.11-based standard does not provide any formal solution to the load-imbalance problem. Several load-balancing schemes have been proposed. Unfortunately, most of them are of limited-benefit under only certain network conditions. In this paper, we propose a joint approach adopting both dynamic-association and adaptive channel-width to enhance the system performance but significantly reducing computational complexity involved. We show that the proposed approach outperforms any individual approaches without increased computational burden. Furthermore, performance measure obtained using the proposed approach is very close to the best result obtained by using an exhaustive search.