Exploiting distance information for transparent access point driven Wi-Fi handovers

IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi) networks' popularity has boomed in recent years and their presence is continuously increasing. More and more large-scale networks are being deployed, consisting of a large number of access points. In these networks, the handover process has proven to be very challenging. In standard Wi-Fi, the client is responsible for making the handover decision and the access point plays no role in it. This can lead to several issues such as short stays, oscillating behaviour and poor overall connectivity. In this paper, we propose a way to shift the handover process from client to access point, without requiring any modification to the client itself. By using network virtualization, we are able to perform proactive and transparent handovers, steered by a centralized controller. This allows us to exploit valuable information such as the clients' distance from all available access points, leading to a better handover process. In this paper, we present several distance aware handover algorithms. The results show that we are able to improve the handover algorithm using this information by reducing the number of handovers and avoiding unnecessary ones. We were able to reduce the throughput penalty during a handover by 50% which leads to a more seamless handover process.