Influence of network load on the performance of opportunistic scanning

This paper presents a detailed performance evaluation of a novel stochastic network discovery approach denoted as opportunistic scanning. Therein, a station only pauses its communication for an extremely short time interval to scan for other technologies / systems. The selected scanning duration is short enough not to be noticeable by higher layer applications with strict QoS constraints.We apply this concept to 802.11-based networks using power saving as one possible signaling protocol to pause the communication between the scanning station and its interlocutor. Within this paper, we present a detailed simulation-based performance analysis of the opportunistic scanning approach showing its effects on real-time services such as VoIP streams. Our results show that opportunistic scanning behaves sturdy against background traffic. This novel approach enables successful network discovery within a 850-milisecond time span while guaranteeing QoS constraints of such a higher layer real-time application.