Fast Handoff based on Enhancement of Network-assisted Radio Signature in 802.11 Dense WMNs

Recently the deployment of IEEE 802.11 Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) has been growing exponentially because of emerging of sharing economy of WiFi. As a result, the handoff delay caused by mobile client (MC) probing for the next preferred AP becomes more challenging in a dense WMN. In this paper, we propose a fast handoff scheme T-NRS (Temporal-NRS) which leverages historical knowledge of APs associated in time series to assist in handoff decision in addition to the Network-assisted Radio Signature(NRS) technique based on spatial knowledge. The enhancement improves the performance whilst eliminates the inflexibility. We implement and evaluate the mechanism in about 200 APs in shopping malls. The results prove the performance of the proposed scheme.