A survey on wireless LAN internal roaming protocols

Wireless LANs (WLANs) are complex systems with many access points (APs) and thousands of clients. The rising amount of roaming users and broadband Internet services have created a very strong demand for fast, efficient, secure, and seamless roaming protocols. A handover roaming protocol allows an user to connect to another access point of same server with proper authentication establishing a session key in such a way that new AP recognizes it as legitimate user of the current network. This paper illustrates brief state-of-the-art survey of existing L2 type handover protocols and discusses pitfall of these protocols in detail. We have also presented briefly, the key challenges and future perspective of the existing wireless roaming protocols.