Proactive Access Point Driven Handovers in IEEE 802.11 Networks

In large and densely deployed IEEE 802.11 networks, a fast and seamless handover scheme is an important aspect in order to provide reliable connectivity for mobile users. However, IEEE 802.11 only supports decentralized, reactive and mobile node-driven handovers resulting in long handover times, packet loss due to interrupted connectivity and sub-optimal access point selection. Recently, centralized approaches have been developed that try to solve many of the challenges but these are mostly proprietary, reactive and require changes to mobile node stacks. In this paper, we propose a novel handover solution based on the principle of Software Defined Networking, that addresses the aforementioned challenges. Using virtualization and softwarization, we shift the traditional mobile node-driven handovers to the access point, while maintaining compliance with legacy devices. Moreover, we develop a proactive handover algorithm ADNA, which combines network state, traffic load and node mobility information. We evaluate our approach extensively in a testbed, showing that it outperforms existing approaches by improving the overall throughput by 116% while reducing the number of handovers by 44% on average.