Handoff optimization and load balancing in wireless LANs using association control.

As users move around in wireless local area networks, they associate with different access points in succession to maintain connectivity. Without the carefully designed association control policy, it may lead to frequent handoffs and imbalanced load, which can potentially incur unacceptable delays and poor throughput. While existing works to this issue mainly focus on minimizing the number of handoffs over time, in this paper, we propose a new association control scheme with the goal of reducing the frequency of handoffs and balancing load among access points. The defined problem, handoff optimization and load balancing (HOLB,) is mathematically described as a minimum-maximum programming. Since the HOLB problem is a nondeterministic polynomial-time hard, two constant approximation algorithms are presented to resolve it. First, we propose an α-approximation( [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]