Intelligent resource allocation in wireless networks: Predictive models for efficient access point management

Abstract

With the significant increase in mobile users connected to the wireless network, coupled with the escalating energy consumption and the risk of network saturation, the search for resource management has become paramount. Managing several access points throughout a whole region is hugely relevant in this context. Moreover, a wireless network must keep its Service Level Agreement, regardless of the number of connected users. With that in mind, in this work, we propose four prediction models that allow one to predict the number of connected users on a wireless network. Once the number of users has been predicted, the network resources can be properly allocated, minimizing the number of active access points. We investigate the use of Particle Swarm Optimization and Genetic Algorithms to hyper-parameterize a Multilayer Perceptron neural network and a Decision Tree. We evaluate our proposal using a campus-based wireless network dataset with more than 20,000 connected users. As a result, our model can considerably improve network performance by intelligently allocating the number of access points, thereby addressing concerns related to energy consumption and network saturation. The results have shown an average accuracy of 95.18%, managing to save network resources effectively.