Design of a fast handoff scheme for real-time media application on the IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN

Abstract

This paper proposes and analyzes a fast handoff scheme that exploits the overallocated bandwidth inevitably generated to guarantee the QoS requirement of real-time multimedia stream on the IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN. By using the reserved but not used network time and making the priority of the probe frame higher than any other data frames, AP and station can exchange RTS/CTS to negotiate when to send probe message, making AP immediately respond to the probe request with probe response message in the CFP. The result of simulation that focuses on the effect of the amount of overalloation and average number of simultaneous requests, shows that the proposed scheme reduces the AP scan time maximally by 16% for the given experiment parameters. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.