Handoff optimization and load balancing in wireless LANs using association control

As users move around in wireless local area networks, they associate with different access points in succession to maintain connectivity. Without the carefully designed association control policy, it may lead to frequent handoffs and imbalanced load, which can potentially incur unacceptable delays and poor throughput. While existing works to this issue mainly focus on minimizing the number of handoffs over time, in this paper, we propose a new association control scheme with the goal of reducing the frequency of handoffs and balancing load among access points. The defined problem, handoff optimization and load balancing (HOLB,) is mathematically described as a minimum–maximum programming. Since the HOLB problem is a nondeterministic polynomial‐time hard, two constant approximation algorithms are presented to resolve it. First, we propose an α‐approximation() centralized algorithm CHOLB. CHOLB employs a novel method to simplify the original problem to the minimum‐cost maximum‐flow problem, which is solved in polynomial time. On the sis of CHOLB, we then put forward a β‐approximation () distributed algorithm DHOLB for the purpose of scalability and lightweight. DHOLB partitions the network into clusters and uses CHOLB as its local centralized algorithm within each cluster. Extensive evaluations show that the proposed algorithms outperform the existing schemes in terms of the handoff frequency and traffic load. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.