Dynamic Access-Point Configuration Approach for Elastic Wireless Local-Area Network System and Its Implementation Using Raspberry Pi

Abstract

Recently, Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) have increased popularity around the world, where users can easily access to the Internet through associations with access points (APs) using mobile devices like smart phones, tablets, and laptops. In a WLAN, it is common that the number of users is always changing by time and users are not evenly distributed in the field. To optimize the number of active APs and the host associations in the network depending on traffic demands from users, previously, we proposed the AP configuration algorithm for the elastic WLAN system. Unfortunately, this algorithm can find the solution for the fixed user state in the network, although users often repeat joining and leaving the network. In this paper, we propose the extension of the AP configuration algorithm to deal with this dynamic nature. Here, as practical situations, this extension considers that at most one host may join or leave at the same time, and any communicating AP cannot be suspended and any communicating host cannot change its associated AP. Through numerical experiments using the WIMNET simulator in two network instances, the effectiveness of the proposal is demonstrated. Furthermore, it is implemented in the elastic WLAN system testbed using Raspberry Pi for the AP. The performance of this implementation is verified through experiments in four scenarios.