An approximation algorithm for AP association under user migration cost constraint

Wangkit Wong, Avishek Thakur, S.-H. Gary Chan

Abstract: In wireless local area networks (WLANs), association of the access points (APs) is often not uniform due to joining and leaving of wireless users. Such imbalance leads to unsatisfactory user throughput due to congestion at some APs and channel under-utilization at others. As users may be covered by multiple APs in WLAN deployment, their throughput can be improved by AP re-association, i.e., migrating some users from the congested APs to the less loaded neighboring APs. Such reassociation is expected to come with some cost (due to overhead in handshaking, authentication and data flow management). In this paper, we study the novel problem of optimizing AP re-association by maximizing the minimum user throughput (i.e., max-min fairness), subject to a certain total user migration cost constraint. We show that the problem is NP-hard. We then propose an efficient approximation algorithm called CACA (Cost-constrained Association Control Algorithm). CACA has provable performance, achieving an approximation factor of (4+ϵ), for any ϵ > 0. It is simple and implementable. Our extensive simulation results based on NS3 show that it substantially outperforms other comparison schemes with close-to-optimal performance (the case without cost constraint). Our testbed experiments further confirm the effectiveness of CACA.