A low latency background scan in IEEE 802.11 networks using a triangular cooperation

During background scan in IEEE 802.11 networks, a mobile node is disconnected from its serving access point and thus it cannot transmit or receive data traffic. In this paper, we propose a novel background scan scheme, called TriScan, to minimize the disconnected time. The proposed scheme allows a mobile node to switch back to its serving channel instead of waiting for any responses (e.g. Beacon or Probe Response) on the probing channels and then indirectly receive them via its serving access point. The simulation results confirm the proposed scheme outperforms than the active background scan.