STOC '01 Proceedings of the thirty-third annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Algorithms, games, and the internet
STOC '01 Proceedings of the thirty-third annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Characterizing user behavior and network performance in a public wireless LAN
SIGMETRICS '02 Proceedings of the 2002 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
Selfish behavior and stability of the internet:: a game-theoretic analysis of TCP
Proceedings of the 2002 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
FOCS '00 Proceedings of the 41st Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
Hot-Spot Congestion Relief in Public-Area Wireless Networks
WMCSA '02 Proceedings of the Fourth IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications
On selfish routing in internet-like environments
Proceedings of the 2003 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
Proceedings of the twenty-second annual symposium on Principles of distributed computing
Proceedings of the 9th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking
Equilibria in topology control games for ad hoc networks
DIALM-POMC '03 Proceedings of the 2003 joint workshop on Foundations of mobile computing
Selfish load balancing and atomic congestion games
Proceedings of the sixteenth annual ACM symposium on Parallelism in algorithms and architectures
Characterizing flows in large wireless data networks
Proceedings of the 10th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking
The changing usage of a mature campus-wide wireless network
Proceedings of the 10th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking
Truthful multicast routing in selfish wireless networks
Proceedings of the 10th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking
Characterizing mobility and network usage in a corporate wireless local-area network
Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Mobile systems, applications and services
On the Access Pricing Issues of Wireless Mesh Networks
ICDCS '06 Proceedings of the 26th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems
On the Access Pricing and Network Scaling Issues of Wireless Mesh Networks
IEEE Transactions on Computers
Performance of wireless heterogeneous networks with always-best-connected users
NGI'09 Proceedings of the 5th Euro-NGI conference on Next Generation Internet networks
Probabilistic voting-theoretic strategies for resource allocation in heterogenous wireless networks
GLOBECOM'09 Proceedings of the 28th IEEE conference on Global telecommunications
Designing a practical access point association protocol
INFOCOM'10 Proceedings of the 29th conference on Information communications
Competition and equilibrium in multiuser networks with multiple service providers
Asilomar'09 Proceedings of the 43rd Asilomar conference on Signals, systems and computers
Election games for resource allocation in multicarrier multiuser wireless networks
MILCOM'09 Proceedings of the 28th IEEE conference on Military communications
A game theoretical study of access point association in wireless mesh networks
Computer Communications
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A user located in a congested area of a wireless LAN may benefit by moving to a less-crowded area and using a less-loaded access point. This idea has gained attention from researchers in recent literature [A. Balachandran, P. Bahl, G. Voelker, Hot-spot congestion relief in public-area wireless networks, in: IEEE WMCSA, Callicoon, NY, June 2002; M. Satyanarayanan, Pervasive computing: visions and challenges, IEEE Personal Communications 8 (4) (2001) 10-17]. However, its effectiveness and stability are questionable. Each user selects the access point that offers the optimal trade-off between load and distance to be traveled. Since users are selfish, a user's selection may adversely impact other users, in turn motivating them to change their selections. Also, future user arrivals and exits may invalidate current selections. This paper presents the first game-theoretic analysis of this idea. We model access point selection as a game, characterize the Nash equilibria of the system and examine distributed myopic selections that naturally mimic selfish users. We analytically and empirically assess the impact of user diversity and dynamic exit patterns on system behavior. The paper contributes to a deeper understanding of the costs, benefits and stability of such a solution in various usage scenarios, which is an essential pre-requisite for real-world deployment.