A Context Transfer Mechanism for IEEE 802.11r in the Centralized Wireless LAN Architecture

Abstract

A station (STA) has the demand of the basic service set (BSS) transition in the emergence of centralized wireless LAN (WLAN)architecture. The centralized WLAN architecture is a centralized hierarchical network and is suitable for large scale deployment. In this paper, we propose a context transfer mechanism using cluster-chain to reduce the BSS transition delay in the centralized WLAN architecture. Comparing with the existing context transfer schemes in terms of BSS transition, the proposed mechanism can have (i) lower signaling cost for context transfer and (ii) higher hit rate in term of STA's context.