Handoff functions for a Distributed Queuing Collision Avoidance Medium Access Control protocol for Wireless LANs

The distributed queuing with collision avoidance (DQCA) medium access control (MAC) protocol has been presented in the literature as a high-performance protocol for uplink traffic in WLANs. Previous works regarding DQCA are focused on the operation of a single cell, where no interaction with neighboring sites is considered. In this paper, we define specific handoff functions (channel sensing, discovery and reassociation functions) that enable the roaming of users in a scenario composed by a number of different DQCA access points deployed in a specific area using different channel frequencies.