A Channel Splitting Strategy for Reducing Handoff Delay in Internet-Based Wireless Mesh Networks

Seamless intergateway handoff support is an essential issue to ensure continuous communications in Internet-based wireless mesh networks (WMNs). Due to the existence of multihop wireless links, traditional handoff schemes designed for single-hop wireless access networks can hardly guarantee the low handoff latency requirement in multihop WMNs. Existing solutions on reducing the handoff delay in WMNs ignore one important factor for the long handoff delay: the channel access delay of handoff signaling packets over the multihop wireless mesh backbone network. In this paper, we address the seamless intergateway handoff issue in Internet-based WMNs from a different perspective and propose a channel splitting strategy to reduce the channel access delay of handoff signaling packets over multihop wireless links. The handoff procedures of two scenarios when a mobile node has one or two transceivers are designed, and two transmission strategies for scheduling the delivery of handoff signaling packets are proposed. Simulation results show that by using the proposed channel splitting strategy, the handoff delay requirement in WMNs can be guaranteed, regardless of the background data traffic, and the average channel utilization can also be improved.