Active scanning: A better approach to reduce handover time at MAC layer for wireless networks

Extensive studies have been carried out for reducing the handover time of wireless network at medium access layer (MAC). However, none of them depicts the impact of reduced handover time on the overall performance of wireless networks. This paper presents the methodology that can be used to effectively reduce the handover time. Our proposed model incorporates many critical performance measurements to show the impact of reduced handover time on wireless networks. Our experiments verify that the active scanning can reduce the overall handover time at MAC layer if comparatively shorter beacon intervals are utilized for packet transmission.