Analysis of the effects of handoff on the performance of tactical communication systems using WLANs

With the recent explosive growth of the WLAN industry, the WLANs are becoming very popular option in tactical communication systems. The ad hoc deployment of the system results in numerous handoffs significantly affecting the performance of the system. Analysis of the effects of hand-off on the performance of emerging multi-rate WLAN is a complicated problem involving details of handoff decision algorithm and the relationship between the throughput and distance of a mobile terminal from the access point. During the handoff mobile terminal has to find the appropriate data-rate to roam and at the same time minimize the ping-pong effect caused by fading characteristics of channel. In this paper we present a framework for analysis of the effects of fading and handoff decision algorithms on the performance of multi-rate WLAN terminals used in tactical communication scenarios. Using a tactical scenario we provide a comparative performance evaluation among four handoff decision algorithms affected by fading characteristics of the channel