Experience-driven selective scan for 802.11 networks

Abstract

The current use of the IEEE 802.11 protocol does not fully meet the full requirements of real-time applications. During the handoff period the STA cannot receive traffic and the quality of these applications is therefore reduced. A significant cause of this latency is that the STA normally scans all possible channels before synchronizing one of them. Considering that normally several channels are empty and that the 802.11 infrastructure architecture provides for fixed access points, it is possible to reduce the overall latency by reducing the number of channels to be scanned. In this paper we show an algorithm for selectively scanning just one probable channel. If such a channel is not available, the algorithm selects a second candidate until it scans all channels. These probabilities depend on the movements inside that LAN of previous STA. We show motivations and specifications of the algorithm