802.11 Handover optimization to improve communications of mobile workers

Seamless performance of communication applications is critical for today´s mobile workers who are dependent on their mobile computing devices. One area of such criticality is the smoothness of handovers between Access Points (APs) in 802.11 based communications. In this work, two heuristic handover algorithms based on indoor positioning are designed and tested on 802.11 based networks. The two algorithms, named “position based” and “prediction based” utilizes a previously populated position based RSSI database to determine the optimal AP to connect at a particular location. The goal is to select the best AP at each identified location in order to optimize the performances of an application (in terms of lesser number of packets lost and to achieve the optimum throughput). To test these algorithms, we build a testing environment with an indoor based mobile factory worker. This worker utilizes a Microsoft Windows based operating environment considering the fact that a vast majority of today´s mobile computing devices are run on Microsoft Windows based platforms. The indoor environment is populated with 802.11b APs which are distributed along the mobile worker´s path. The performance is measured in terms of the performance of the applications run on the mobile computing device generating TCP and UDP based traffic. The results conclude that both algorithms outperform the algorithm used conventionally by the Microsoft Windows operating environment considering the maximum throughput achieved.