Innovative handoff avoidance mechanism and QoS enhancement for future WLANs

Abstract

With the development of wireless communication technologies, IEEE 802.11 standard has undergone a rapid growth, thanks to low cost and high-speed connectivity. More importantly, the Future wireless networks are expected to have the privilege of ubiquitous connectivity extending its support to several applications. Hence effective mechanisms need to be developed to exploit the diversity across a multiple access points and to provide a uniform load distribution in order to improve the QoS of users and to improve the overall composite capacity. In this paper, we propose a cognitive handoff mechanism that adaptively applies full channel scheme before and First Satisfaction First Reservation Handoff (FSFR-HO) Mechanism after minimum delay limitation time of sensitive application used in MH by considering the current active application in use rather than a single fixed threshold value and dynamically changing the threshold value depending upon the currently active applications. In addition to it, we also propose distributive Load Balancing scheme which completely avoids unnecessary overloading of access points by considering the load at the target access point before associating with it.