Toward an autonomic control of wireless access networks

In this paper, we present a solution to control automatically a wireless access network and we focus on load balancing target. The reference scenario is that of a single administrative domain that offers a heterogeneous wireless access. We propose a monitoring procedure able to track the access network context, i.e., the current state of resources, the amount of service demand, and the wireless access points available to mobile terminals. To this end, we exploit a cooperative brokerage framework, distributed between terminals and network. The access network context is the input of a selection process that aims to distribute suitably mobile users among available access points. The objective is to balance the users demand, thus improving the quality of the service. The numerical analysis shows the effectiveness of the proposed system in an 802.11b access network.