A novel prevent-scan Handoff technique for IEEE 802.11 WLANs

We propose and evaluate the performance of a novel handoff scheme for IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs (WLANs) supporting mobile applications. Because of their wide deployment in public areas, supporting seamless, low-latency, handoffs between pairs of adjacent WLANs becomes a crucial requirement for applications such as voice and video over IP. Handoff latency is an important delay that affects the quality of real-time applications like voice over IP (VoIP). In this paper, we present a novel handoff scheme, called prevent-scan handoff procedure (PSHP), to enhance the quality of service (QoS) for multimedia communications over 802.11 wireless networks. Through performance evaluation, we show that our technique results in a significant decrease in handoff latency, thus achieving both fast and seamless handoff for WLANs.