Fast handoff to reduce probe latency in wireless LANs

Abstract

In wireless LANs, it becomes a problem that the time which cannot communicate while performing the handoff becomes comparatively large. The handoff is constituted by three procedures, probe, authentication, and association. It is known that the most of handoff latency is the time which needs to probe new access points. For this reason, this paper focuses on to reduce the probe lateny. We propose two new probe methods, the one reduces wasted probe wait and wasted channel by using neighbor graph which shows handoff relationship between access points, and the others reduces wasted probe wait by using carrier sense to speculate a channel state. Via simulation, the proposed methods reduces the probe latency. Moreover, it is shown that probe latency is reduced by combining existing methods and proposed methods.