A Novel Handover Scheme for Improving the Performance of WLANs based on IEEE802.11

Abstract

Recently, new technologies improve WLANs to provide high quality of service (QoS) and support real time applications. In this paper, we improve network efficiency in terms of reducing the latency time in handover process and support traffic load sharing among neighbor access points (APs). We neglect both detection phase and search phase in the conventional handover scheme by proposing a pre-active scan phase, which works during normal connectivity. This phase will scan for the information of neighbor APs, which in turn is used to decide whether to perform a handover or not. The results from our simulation show the proposed handover scheme is more effective than the conventional one in terms of providing low latency time and support traffic load sharing among neighbor APs