Context Aware Handover Management: Sustaining QoS and QoE in a Public IEEE 802.11e Hotspot

IEEE 802.11 Community wireless hotspots are widely used to provide ubiquitous Internet connections to the end-users in public areas such as airports and restaurants. The recent analysis of the traffic pattern in a wireless hotspot shows more APs are deployed in a public area than required, though the users visit only a few APs. As a consequence, severe load imbalance is observed in a hotspot local area network (LAN), that results in performance degradation in terms of quality of service (QoS) for the network and quality of experience (QoE) for the end-users. This paper proposes a set of bandwidth management policies to achieve this goal, and the effectiveness of these policies is analyzed theoretically. According to the theoretical foundation, a context aware handover management scheme for proper load distribution in a public IEEE 802.11 network, supporting the class-aware bandwidth management policies, is designed in this paper. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated using an IEEE 802.11g+e wireless LAN testbed, and compared with other schemes proposed in the literature.