Improving the IEEE 802.11 MAC layer handoff latency to support multimedia traffic

Authors:
Yogesh Ashok Powar;Varsha Apte
Affiliations:
Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India;Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India
Venue:
WCNC'09 Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE conference on Wireless Communications & Networking Conference
Year:
2009

Citing 5
Cited 0

An empirical analysis of the IEEE 802.11 MAC layer handoff process

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
Improving the latency of 802.11 hand-offs using neighbor graphs

Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services
Using smart triggers for improved user performance in 802.11 wireless networks

Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Mobile systems, applications and services
Eliminating handoff latencies in 802.11 WLANs using multiple radios: applications, experience, and evaluation

IMC '05 Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet Measurement
How well can the IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN support quality of service?

IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Multimedia applications can be offered to mobile users on the IEEE 802.11 WLAN, if their bandwidth, delay and jitter requirements are met, even in the presence of handoffs. Applications such as VoIP require a delay of less than 150 msecs and packet loss less than 3%. Studies have shown that the latencies achieved by existing handoff implementations can exceed 200 ms and packet loss can exceed 10%. Thus, there is a need for fast handoff solutions, that can meet multimedia traffic requirements. We propose a mechanism for layer-2 fast handoff with the help of background scanning, restricted channel set and preauthentication which does not require any code modification at the access points. The mechanism has been implemented in the MadWiFi wireless open source Linux drivers and tested in an indoor wireless environment. Results have shown that our mechanism achieves latency of less than 10 msec with negligible packet loss even in the presence of handoffs. Thus our mechanism makes mobile multimedia applications possible in IEEE 802.11 WLANs.