IEEE 802.11 Community wireless hotspots are widely used to provide ubiquitous Internet connections to the endusers in public areas such as airports and restaurants. The recent analysis of the traffic pattern in a wireless hotspot shows more APs are deployed in a public area than required, though the users visit only a few APs. As a consequence, severe load imbalance is observed in a hotspot local area network (LAN), that results in performance degradation in terms of quality of service (QoS) for the network and quality of experience (QoE) for the end-users. This paper proposes a set of bandwidth management policies to achieve this goal, and the effectiveness of these policies is analyzed theoretically. According to the theoretical foundation, a context aware handover management scheme for proper load distribution in a public IEEE 802.11 network, supporting the class-aware bandwidth management policies, is designed in this paper. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated using an IEEE 802.11g+e wireless LAN testbed, and compared with other schemes proposed in the literature.Index Terms-Handover management, load balancing, IEEE 802.11e, QoE, QoS.
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