IEICE Trans - An Incentive-Compatible Load Distribution Approach for Wireless Local Area Networks with Usage-Based Pricing

An Incentive-Compatible Load Distribution Approach for Wireless Local Area Networks with Usage-Based Pricing

Bo GU
Kyoko YAMORI
Sugang XU
Yoshiaki TANAKA

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications Vol.E96-B No.2 pp.451-458
Publication Date: 2013/02/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1345
DOI: 10.1587/transcom.E96.B.451
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Quality of Communication Services Improving Quality of Life)
Category:
Keyword:
quality of service, load balancing, pricing, local area network, game theory,

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Summary:
Recent studies have shown that the traffic load is often distributed unevenly among the access points. Such load imbalance results in an ineffective bandwidth utilization. The load imbalance and the consequent ineffective bandwidth utilization could be alleviated via intelligently selecting user-AP associations. In this paper, the diversity in users' utilities is sufficiently taken into account, and a Stackelberg leader-follower game is formulated to obtain the optimal user-AP association. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm on improving the degree of load balance is evaluated via simulations. Simulation results show that the performance of the proposed algorithm is superior to or at least comparable with the best existing algorithms.