An access-point aggregation approach for energy-saving wireless local area networks

Nowadays, with spreads of inexpensive small communication devices, a number of wireless local area networks (WLANs) have been deployed even in the same building for the Internet access services. Their wireless access-points (APs) are often independently installed and managed by different groups such as departments or laboratories in a university or a company. Then, a user host can access to multiple WLANs by detecting signals from their APs, which increases the energy consumption and the operational cost. It may also degrade the communication performance by increasing interferences. In this paper, we present an AP aggregation approach to solve these problems in multiple WLAN environments by aggregating deployed APs of different groups into limited ones using virtual APs. First, we formulate the AP aggregation problem as a combinatorial optimization problem and prove the NP-completeness of its decision problem. Then, we propose its heuristic algorithm composed of five phases. We verify the effectiveness through extensive simulations using the WIMNET simulator.