Fast handoff by multi-beacon listening in IEEE 802.11 WLAN networks

Abstract

It has been a challenging issue to support delay-sensitive multimedia applications in IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN (WLAN) because the current WLAN handoff procedure is subject to a long handoff delay. To improve mobility support, we propose an access point (AP) multi-channel multi-beacon scheme. In the proposed scheme, mobile stations (MSs) keep listening beacons transmitted periodically from the neighbor APs during beacon period to decide which AP is to be connected for service continuity. Numerical results show that our scheme has lower handoff delay time and is suitable for mobile multimedia applications.