Abstract
Maximizing network throughput while providing fairness is one of the key challenges in wireless LANs (WLANs). This goal is typically achieved when the load of access points (APs) is balanced. In this article, we study this AP selection problem in a decentralized manner with the objective of maximizing the minimum throughput among all clients. We reveal through theoretical analysis that the selfish strategy, which commonly applies in decentralized systems, cannot effectively achieve this objective. Accordingly, we propose an AP association strategy that not only achieves a minimum throughput (among all clients) that is provably close to the optimum, but also works effectively in practice with a reasonable computation and transmission overheads. In addition we minimize both load imbalance factor and metric—movement cost as much as possible.