Proactive Scan: Fast Handoff with Smart Triggers for 802.11 Wireless LAN

It has been a challenging problem to support VoIP-type delay sensitive applications in an 802.11 wireless LAN, because the standard handoff procedure implemented in many current 802.11 products occurs a delay deem unacceptable to VoIP users. To reduce this delay, we have developed a fast handoff scheme called Proactive Scan. It employs two new techniques. The first is to decouple the time-consuming channel scan from the actual handoff, and to eliminate channel scan delay by doing scan early and interleaving it with ongoing traffic in a non-intrusive way. The second technique is a smart trigger that takes into account both uplink and downlink quality and explicitly addresses the link asymmetry which has yet not been touched in previous work. Through implementation and experimentation study, we have shown that Proactive Scan does provide fast handoff and satisfactory performance to VoIP applications. Further, it is a software-only client-only solution that any mobile device can use in any existing 802.11 networks.