Enhanced User Association in Software-Defined WLANs for AP and Channel Load Balancing

In traditional Wi-Fi networks user-AP association is usually driven by the highest signal strength. However, especially in case of very dense deployments, this may lead to uneven user distributions and thus, to poor network performances. Most of current research addresses this problem by focusing either on (i) maximizing average signal quality; (ii) AP load or (iii) maximizing average througput. Nevertheless, proposed solutions are hard to implement while preserving compatibility with IEEE 802.11 standard. In this regard, Software Dened Networking (SDN) has recently emerged as a novel approach for network control and management. In this paper we present an SDN-based solution for joint user association and channel assignment in Wi-Fi networks. It jointly considers the aforementioned indicators as input to make more accurate user association decisions towards higher perofrmance and network effciency.