Location based fast MAC handoffs in 802.11

Wireless local area networks are increasing now days due to its ease of deployment and convenience to use. Mainly, it is provided in hotspots, places like coffee bars, airports, shopping centers etc where the hotspots are covered by access points. Handoff process takes place when a mobile terminal moves from one access point to another. Existing methods require around 400 ms for the handoff process, which causes serious problems for multimedia applications like audio and video streaming and real time applications like VOIP. These applications require continuous connectivity to mobile clients through a seamless handoff from one access point to another. In this paper we propose a layer 2 handoff method to reduce the handoff delay. In this method we predict the next most favorable access point even before the actual handoff occurs by taking the location and movement information of the mobile node into account. We use the concept of triangulation (used by the GPS) for location and movement tracking. This helps in efficiently predicting the next most likely access point without actual handoff, thereby almost eliminating discovery delay which poses almost 80% of the delay in layer 2 handoff.