Layer-2 mobility management in hybrid wired/wireless systems

In hybrid wired and wireless systems, mobile hosts constantly changes points of attachment to the wired networks, causing frequent disruptions to the ongoing network traffic. An infrastructure supported approach is required to meet the stringent delay and jitter requirements in non-disrupted services. We propose a mobility management scheme, called personal AP, to support seamless roaming. In personal AP systems, the network attachment information, i.e., the association states, of a mobile station is extracted, and handed off from one physical access point to another along with the mobile station, thus eliminating the mobile station from reassociating with new access points. Simulation results show that personal AP can greatly reduce the handoff latencies, and is suitable to support delay-sensitive multimedia applications