Traffic Aware Load Balancing in Software Defined WiFi Networks for Healthcare

The healthcare WiFi networks comprise of several access points (APs) to meet the fast-growing demand for wireless access. Most of the network load on the APs circulates unevenly because the wireless stations (STAs) associate to the AP with the best received signal strength indicator (RSSI), ignoring the load. This causes a user to experience poor network quality. Software defined networking (SDN) brings flexibility and programmability to the WiFi network by separating the data and control plane. The network is managed efficiently through a centralized approach in SDN. In this paper load balancing among APs and traffic prioritization is achieved in a healthcare scenario using SDN. A traffic aware load balancing strategy (TALB) is proposed. TALB helps to balance the load, based on the fairness and average load levels among the APs in an extended service set (ESS) environment and also route the wireless traffic using the OpenFlow protocol based on service differentiation. The emulation is performed on Mininet-NS3-WiFi platform. We compare and examine the performance of the proposed TALB with DASA and traditional RSSI schemes. The emulated results show that the proposed TALB performs better than the DASA and traditional RSSI schemes in throughput, fairness and average frame delay performance.