A Distributed Algorithm for AP Association with Random Arrivals and Departures of Users

Here, the authors study the novel problem of optimising access point (AP) association by maximising the network throughput, subject to the degree bound of AP. The formulated problem is a combinatorial optimisation. They resort to the Markov Chain approximation technique to design a distributed algorithm. They first approximate their optimal objective via Log-Sum-Exp function. Thereafter, they construct a special class of Markov Chain with steady-state distribution specify to their problem to yield a distributed solution. Furthermore, they extend the static problem setting to a dynamic environment where the users can randomly leave or join the system. Their proposed algorithm has provable performance, achieving an approximation gap of $({1}/{\eta})\log |\mathscr {F}|$(1/η)log⁡|F| . It is simple and can be implemented in a distributed manner. Their extensive simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can converge very fast, and achieve a close-to-optimal performance with a guaranteed loss bound.