User-centric management of wireless LANs

With the ever increasing deployment density of Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), more and more access points (APs) are deployed within users' vicinity. The effective management of these APs to optimize the users' throughput becomes an important challenge in high-density deployment environments. In this paper, we propose a user-centric network management framework to optimize users' throughput taking into consideration both the network conditions sensed by users and their access priorities. The proposed framework is built around an information pipeline that facilitates the sharing of the information needed for optimal management of communication resources. Theoretical analysis and extensive simulations are presented on two major management activities: AP association and channel selection, and demonstrate that the proposed user-centric network management framework significantly outperforms traditional network management framework in the high-density deployment environment. © 2011 IEEE.