Meta-heuristic Solution for Dynamic Association Control in Virtualized Multi-rate WLANs

Chaotic deployment of Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) in dense urban areas is one of the common issues of many Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Wi-Fi users. It results in a substantial reduction of the throughput and impedes the balanced distribution of bandwidth among the users. Most of these networks are managed independently and there is no cooperation among them. Moreover, the conventional association mechanism that selects the Access Points (APs) with the strongest Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) aggravates this situation. In this paper, we present a versatile near-optimal solution for the fair bandwidth distribution over virtualized WLANs through dynamic association control. The proposed scheme is called ACO-PF, which is developed on top of Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) as a meta-heuristic technique to provide Proportional Fairness (PF) among the greedy clients. In fact, it presents a generic and centralized solution for ISPs that are using a common, virtualized or overlapped WLAN infrastructure for serving their customers. We have evaluated the efficacy of ACO-PF through numerical analysis versus popular existing schemes for both downlink and uplink scenarios. Our proposed technique has less complexity in terms of the implementation and running time for large-scale WLANs and it can be easily developed and customized for different objective functions. In addition, it is implemented in a testbed environment to investigate the key challenges of real deployment scenarios.