Achieving Load Balancing in High-Density Software Defined WiFi Networks

In high-density WiFi networks, load balancing is important to improve network utilization and ensure fairness in terms of network usage among end-users. However, load balancing is difficult to achieve in traditional WiFi networks. The emerging software defined network (SDN) architecture is advantageous to achieve measurable, manageable and controllable high-density WiFi networks. In this paper, we propose a load balancing scheme for SD-WiFi networks, which jointly considers the overload problem and the hand-over process. We constructed an emulation platform and a low-cost prototype testbed for high-density WiFi networks to evaluate our load balancing scheme. Our comparative experiments were conducted with the same settings using the emulation tool and the testbed. The proposed scheme outperforms the default settings and three previous schemes including a load-aware access scheme, an adaptive load-balancing scheme, and a load aware handoff scheme, in achieving the best trade-off between network throughput and network fairness.