Optimal Channel Search Time for Handoff in the IEEE 802.11 WLANs

In recent years, the IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs) have become a very popular access network technique. However, due to the large handoff latency, most application scenarios are limited to hot spot areas without handoff across different access points (APs). As the advance of many real-time or highly interactive applications such as voice over IP (VoIP), one of burning issues for the WLAN is to reduce the handoff latency. Current studies in the literature have indicated that the latency in searching available APs dominates the handoff latency. Thus, we propose a simple analytical model to calculate the search latency and success probability for the handoff in the IEEE 802.11 WLAN. A new performance metric, namely the "effective search time (EST)", is introduced to evaluate the latency that is required for a station to successfully search a channel from neighboring APs. Based on the developed model, the optimum numbers of the probe request and response transmission for minimizing the EST can be obtained. Our results demonstrate that, in the environment of 100 contending stations, the EST with optimum number of transmissions can be reduced by 30% compared to that in the legacy IEEE 802.11 WLAN.