High Speed Scalable Mobility Management Architecture over Infrastructural WLAN

Mobility management in a fast moving environment is convoluted by issues like speed of movement, detection of movement, handoff processing and scarcity of media resources. Most of the proposed architectures and solutions for mobility management use complex processing to reduce handoff latencies. In this paper a light-weight fast mobility management scheme is proposed which is based on strategic deployment of wireless LAN (WLAN) hotspots in a hierarchy of overlapped components like handoff anchor points (HAP), access routers (ARs) and access points (APs). The major handoff decision is taken in the HAP, a novel component in proposed architecture, which last for a significantly longer time due to reduced chances in probable moving path and by sending early binding updates through active ARs. Handoff latency has been reduced to almost link layer handoff time with a high level of predictability and reliability. Simulation results highlight improvements achieved in throughput, scalability, and handoff latencies.