Multimedia Ready Handoff Technique for 802.11 Networks

IEEE 802.11 wireless networks have caught the fancy of wireless service providers and are being very commonly deployed for providing internet access and real time services at public places like airports, hotels and university campuses. We have proposed and implemented a practical handoff technique aimed at reducing handoff latency to less than 10ms. Handoff latency has been reduced by decoupling scanning from handoff execution process. Effect of the proposed scheme on commercial VoIP client, Skype has been evaluated. Effect of the proposed handoff and optimized Background Scan on audio and video streaming has also been investigated. Results show that the proposed handoff scheme casts minimal effect on multimedia VoIP and audio/video streaming traffic and is multimedia ready.