An SDN-based Dual AP Load Balancing Scheme for Wireless Networks

Access point (AP) load balancing is one of several ways for a wireless local area network (WLAN) to perform efficiently such that the WiFi devices connected to the WLAN would appropriately consume bandwidth. Our proposal is an AP load balancing scheme that leverages the capabilities of Software Defined Networking (SDN) to provide appropriate network resources to the WiFi devices. Two load balancing algorithms were introduced and evaluated on an actual SDN-enabled dual AP WLAN. The first load balancing algorithm is based on a naive approach, while the second one is based on the signal readings of the nodes for the two APs. The performance of the two load balancing algorithms were compared to the performance of the network when no load balancing is implemented. The results demonstrate that both load balancing algorithms exhibited an average of 65.57% decrease in variance among the individual throughput of the wireless devices connected to the network, implying fairer bandwidth consumption compared to when the load balancing techniques are not implemented. On the average, 70.37% of the wireless devices in the network experienced an increase in their throughput compared to their throughput when the load balancing scheme is absent. Moreover, the second load balancing algorithm increased the average throughput of the network by an average of 15.4% compared to the first algorithm.