QoE-Based Reduction of Handover Delay for Multimedia Application in IEEE 802.11 Networks

Wireless local area network (WLAN) is becoming increasingly important due to the explosive growth of mobile data traffic. The user in some hot spot areas is usually covered with multiple access points (APs). However, the subsequent challenge is the users´ devices need to handover between these APs as the user moves, and it introduces large latency during the handoff process. For multimedia application, quality of experience (QoE) is an essential measurement for network evaluation. But the large handover latency which gives rise to an interruption will greatly degrade the users´ QoE to an intolerable extent. Therefore a neighbor list based proactive handoff scheme which has sufficient low handover latency will reduce service disruptions. The proposed scheme exploits the active scan based on information of neighboring APs, received signal strength indicator (RSSI), and variable bitrate video coding (VBR) to reduce handover delay and service interruption. Based on the analysis and simulation, it can be seen that the proposed scheme can decrease the handover time efficiently and increase QoE.