Adaptive System for 802.11 Scanning

In this context, a mobile user may deal with a high variety of scenarios. These scenarios consist on heterogeneous access point (AP) deployments characterized by overlapping frequencies, traffic load and high interference. Moreover, these conditions cannot be anticipated by the mobile user while moving between APs and thus an appropriate scanning algorithm is needed. The change of AP, also known as handover, involves scanning for APs, authentication and association. During the handover process, a mobile station (MS) cannot send or receive data, so the handover latency must be as low as possible. Related work particularly focuses on the reduction of the scanning latency, representing 90% of the whole handover process.