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
Self-management in chaotic wireless deployments
Proceedings of the 11th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking
Improved access point selection
Proceedings of the 4th 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
A virtualization architecture for wireless network cards
A virtualization architecture for wireless network cards
IMC '05 Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet Measurement
Effect of background scan on performance of neighbouring channels in 802.11 networks
International Journal of Communication Networks and Distributed Systems
A signalling technique for disseminating neighbouring AP channel information to mobile stations
ICDCN'06 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Distributed Computing and Networking
Agent assisted mobility and load aware fast handoff scheme in wireless mesh networks
International Journal of Internet Protocol Technology
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Nowadays, 802.11-based wireless networks have gained greater popularity as they cover more schools, restaurants, offices, and cities. Unlike static wireless connections, people expect user-friendly features from 802.11 wireless networking infrastructures such as support for seamless roaming. In this paper, we study the handoff process in large AP-dense 802.11 networks, which are among the most commonly used forms of 802.11 networks. To enable faster and smoother handoffs in these AP-dense networks, we focus on improving the AP scan process, which is a bottleneck to such handoffs. We carry out a series of field experiments and evaluate critical handoff parameters through extensive analysis of the acquired data. From these experiments, we discover two key features, differentiated probe response time and rich AP information hidden in wireless traffic, which can improve the AP scan process. We present our solution, Scan in AP-dense 802.11 Networks (D-Scan for short), that leverages these features to do so. We conduct real-world experiments that show D-Scan's strong performance compared with current AP scan solutions.