Load balancing in overlapping wireless LAN cells

Abstract

We propose a load-balancing scheme for overlapping wireless LAN cells. Agents running in each access point broadcast periodically the local load level via the Ethernet backbone and determines whether the access point is overloaded, balanced or under-loaded by comparing it with the received reports. The load metric is the access point throughput. Overloaded access points force the handoff of some stations to balance the load. Only the under-loaded access points accept the roaming stations in minimizing the number of handoffs. We show via experimental evaluation that our balancing scheme increases the total wireless network throughput and decreases the cell delay.