QoS-Aware Load Balancing Scheme in Dense Wi-Fi 6 WLANs

Nowadays, increasing mobile and wireless usage demand accelerates new enhancements on IEEE 802.11 family to provide concurrent transmission and high efficiency. Thus, IEEE 802.11ax is released with the aim to improve overall throughput in dense WLANs considering the overlapping channel interference. However, the current WLANs suffer from uneven load distribution among the Access Points (AP). Because a station simply connects to the AP with the highest received signal strength indication (RSSI) in a legacy association way. And RSSI might not be the only criteria in the current WLANs due to the variety of application requirements and high date rates. Therefore, we propose a complete association scheme called Access Controller (AC) to manage admission, association, and adaptive carrier sensitivity control as a whole. The station from an overloaded AP is handed to a less loaded AP by considering various crucial metrics such as packet delivery ratio, fairness, RSSI, throughput, and round trip time. After effective load balancing, we adaptively tune the carrier sensitivity threshold to enhance concurrent transmission in IEEE 802.11ax WLANs. The results show that the proposed AC scheme outperforms in terms of fairness and per-station throughput in dense WiFi6 scenarios with over 500 stations.