Patent attributes
Association control is utilized for associating wireless local area network users with at least one wireless local area network access point and thereby achieving simultaneous fairness and load balancing. In the present method, a network operation center receives user parameters from each user in the wireless network via the access points. It then sets out both to determine a set of associations between each user and one or more access points based on the user parameters using fractional load balancing and produce a second set of associations by rounding so that, in said second set, each user is associated with only one access point. The present method achieves close to optimal load balancing and max-min fairness while outperforming commonly-used heuristic approaches.
