An adaptive load balancing application for software-defined enterprise WLANs

In current Enterprise WLANs (EWLANs), traffic load on access points (APs) is often unevenly distributed as wireless stations (WS) independently select the AP with best signal strength to associate with, which leads to issues such as sub-optimal network throughput and degradation of user quality of experience (QoE). Existing load balancing solutions based on the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) continue to exhibit inefficiencies. Software Defined Networking (SDN) promises to provide flexibility and programmability for network management. Leveraging SDN to existing EWLANs, the efficiency of load balancing can be improved significantly. This paper propose an adaptive load balancing solution which proactively balance network traffic based on AP load and RSSI. Experiment results show that both packet loss rate and network throughput are improved significantly compared to the conventional load balancing algorithm.