S3: Characterizing Sociality for User-Friendly Steady Load Balancing in Enterprise WLANs

Traffic load is often unevenly distributed among the access points (APs) in enterprise WLANs. Such load imbalance results in sub-optimal network throughput and unfair bandwidth allocation among users. In this paper, we collect real traces from over twelve thousand WiFi users in Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Through intensive data analysis, we find that user behavior like leaving together may cause significant AP load imbalance problem. We also observe from the trace that users with similar application usage have the potential to leave together. Inspired by those observations, we propose an innovative scheme, Social-aware AP Selection Scheme(S3), which can actively learn the sociality information among users trained with their history application profiles and elegantly assign users based on the obtained knowledge. Both real prototype implementation and simulation results show that S3 is feasible and can achieve 41.2% balancing performance gain on average.