Smooth handoff in infrastructure wireless mesh networks

Supporting user mobility is an important requirement for wireless mesh networks. We propose a relay-router buffering-and-forwarding scheme for supporting smooth handoff in the infrastructure wireless mesh networks. Our proposal is based on buffering packets at intermediate relay routers in the packets forwarding route and neighbouring relay routers working in promiscuous mode which can overhear the packet transmission from neighbouring relay routers to APs. With the help of relay routers, the forwarding path of buffered packets is shortened greatly. The relay routers selection is based on multipoint relays of OLSR protocol. Simulation results show that this scheme improves the data availability and results in reducing the packet loss significantly.