Personal AP protocol for mobility management in IEEE 802.11 systems

In mobile wireless systems, the quest to support delay-stringent multimedia applications challenges most existing solutions to the mobility support and traffic management problems. An infrastructure supported approach is required to provide non-disrupted services with seamless roaming capabilities. We propose a mobility management scheme called personal AP, to support station mobility efficiently. In personal AP mobility support system, the mobility context of each mobile station is defined by the relevant state information at the currently associated access point, including the MAC layer association states at the access point. When the mobile station roams, the access point context follows the mobile station from one physical access point to another, thus creating the "ghost" access point following the mobile station and eliminating the mobile station from re-associating with new access points. Personal AP system improve the seamless roaming support by avoid the lengthy re-association process commonly seen in IEEE 802.11 systems. The essential idea of personal AP is applicable in other wireless systems as well.