Despite the planned operation of enterprise wireless local area networks (WLANs), they still experience unsatisfactory performance due to several inefficiencies. One of the major issues is the so-called sticky user problem, in which users remain connected to an access point (AP) until the signal quality becomes too weak. In this paper, we leverage software-defined networking (SDN) to propose a user association solution for WLANs aiming to mitigate such inefficiencies, thus improving resource utilization. As it is a computationally hard problem, we also design various low-complexity user-AP association schemes that consider not only signal quality but also AP loads and minimum quality requirements for user traffic. Moreover, to provide simultaneous content distribution in a sustainable mode, we propose exploiting link-layer multicasting to decide on user-AP associations. Our analysis via simulations and experimentation on an open-source testbed shows that considering user-AP association jointly with multicast delivery leads to a significant performance increase over the default client-driven approach: the median throughput is 11× higher when all users request the same content and the achieved improvement decreases to 68% for 100 contents. Moreover, due to more efficient use of the airtime, unicast users achieve higher throughput if multicast delivery is exploited.

User-AP Association Management in Software-Defined WLANs

Coronado, Estefania;Riggio, Roberto;
2020-01-01

Abstract

Despite the planned operation of enterprise wireless local area networks (WLANs), they still experience unsatisfactory performance due to several inefficiencies. One of the major issues is the so-called sticky user problem, in which users remain connected to an access point (AP) until the signal quality becomes too weak. In this paper, we leverage software-defined networking (SDN) to propose a user association solution for WLANs aiming to mitigate such inefficiencies, thus improving resource utilization. As it is a computationally hard problem, we also design various low-complexity user-AP association schemes that consider not only signal quality but also AP loads and minimum quality requirements for user traffic. Moreover, to provide simultaneous content distribution in a sustainable mode, we propose exploiting link-layer multicasting to decide on user-AP associations. Our analysis via simulations and experimentation on an open-source testbed shows that considering user-AP association jointly with multicast delivery leads to a significant performance increase over the default client-driven approach: the median throughput is 11× higher when all users request the same content and the achieved improvement decreases to 68% for 100 contents. Moreover, due to more efficient use of the airtime, unicast users achieve higher throughput if multicast delivery is exploited.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11582/322425
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