Greedy versus limited access point backhaul resource aggregation in wireless local area networks

We conduct in this work a comparative study betweena greedy versus limited proposals for resource aggregationin the backhaul of wireless local area networks. We consider asetting with several access points, some with excess backhaulcapacity (providers), and others in shortage of it (beneficiaries) and investigate two approaches for the distribution of resourcesbetween them: a greedy one wherein each beneficiary seeksto maximize the resource it could obtain from the providerand a limited one in which the operator limits the amountof acquired resources to some limit, so as to ensure fairnessbetween beneficiaries. We model the system using a one-to-onematching game, and compare the two approaches in threescenarios: a symmetric one with equal number of providersand beneficiaries, and asymmetric ones with higher numberof either providers or beneficiaries. Our results show that thegreedy scheme outperforms the limited one when the numberof providers is larger than that of beneficiaries, the limitedone performs best in the opposite case and ensures fairnessbetween beneficiary access points. In all cases, both approachesoutperform the random allocation scheme.