M3s – Multimedia Mobility Management and Load Balancing in Wireless Broadcast Networks

Wireless local-area networks represent a viable broadband Internet access solution for enterprise, residential and public areas. Due to its short range radio, multiple wireless access points are necessary to cover a certain physical area. The tendency of mobile users to group in certain areas of interest and of mobile devices to connect to the access point with the highest signal strength determines the overall network load to be highly unbalanced. To overcome this issues which drastically affects user bandwidth share as well as the efficiency of network resource utilization, special load balancing techniques has to be employed. This paper presents the Multimedia Mobility Management System (M3S), a quality oriented mobility management framework which aims at maximizing user perceived multimedia quality by efficiently distributing the traffic load over all the communication resources available. Simulation based testing results are presented, outlining the performance of M3S against other load balancing techniques which rely on mobile device re-association with least congested access points.