A Novel Load Balancing Algorithm in IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs with Cell Breathing

Many mechanisms have been studied aimed at resolving load imbalance among access points (APs), which is a key issue in Wireless LANs (WLANs); meanwhile, cell breathing (CB), first appearing in cellular networks, provides another method in controlling coverage scale to realize load balance. In this paper, we present a new load balancing algorithm through power management based on cell breathing. Through establishing a centralized operation agent (COA), the load status of all the APs is monitored and power management is implemented accordingly, thus it avoids repetitive operations and extra management message consumption between APs in the distributive manner. Simulation results show that our algorithm can find a near optimal solution and improve the fairness as well as the performance of the whole network effectively.