Performance Enhancement for Mobility Management in Wireless LANs

Due to the small radio area covered by an Access Point (AP), handoffs frequently occur in Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) as Mobile Stations (MSs) move their associations from one AP to another. This paper presents a new handoff management scheme to support ongoing real-time applications while MSs change their network point of attachment. This approach consists of minimizing the total number of scanned channels, as well as the probe-waiting time for each examined channel. Performance is evaluated through simulations whose results show that our proposal delivers better performance, compared to the IEEE 802.11b Standard, the IEEE 802.11b Standard with Min in which an MS only waits for MinChannelTime on each examined channel and two other well- documented solutions in the literature: Selective Scanning plus Caching and Neighbor Graphs.