Handoff performance enhancement scheme for multi-interface enterprise WLANs

Recently more and more mobile smart devices such as smartphones and smart pads are used, which accelerates wide deployments of IEEE 802.11 based access points (APs) to provide wireless coverage. In IEEE 802.11 networks, a handoff occurs when a mobile station moves from one basic service set (BSS) to another BSS. During the handoff process, long delay may occur, which severely degrades user satisfaction for services that require stringent QoS requirements, such as VoIP and video streaming. In this paper, we propose a handoff scheme to reduce handoff delay under the enterprise wireless local area network (EWLAN) environment. In EWLAN, a special entity called central controller collects wireless channel information and controls system parameters of APs to enhance network performance. In the proposed scheme, each AP is equipped with multiple wireless network interface cards to reduce handoff delay. We performed simulations to evaluate performance, and our simulation results show that the proposed scheme shows lower handoff delay performance than existing handoff schemes.