Multichannel Virtual Access Points for Seamless Handoffs in IEEE 802.11 Wireless Networks

Maria Eugenia Berezin (1) , Franck Rousseau (2) , Andrzej Duda (2)

1 LIG - Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble
2 Drakkar

Within IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), client stations can move freely, but because of the short range of their Access Points (APs), they usually need to reassociate with different APs to continue to communicate. When changing APs, a client station starts a process known as a handoff that can take up to 2 seconds, which is too long for real-time applications such as Voice over IP (VoIP). Various solutions have been proposed to change or improve the client behaviour when doing a handoff. Previously, we proposed the idea of Virtual Access Points (VAP) implemented on APs in which a client station changes APs without disrupting its current communication. Based on this new concept, we have developed a solution called Multichannel Virtual Access Points (mVAP) to take advantage of APs operating on multiple channels. We have implemented mVAP using PACMAP, a tool for packet manipulation, and evaluated its performance. Our results show that mVAP is a new efficient technique for seamless handoffs without performance degradation.

Mots clés: Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN); IEEE 802.11; MAC layer handoff; Access Points; VoIP

Domaines: Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]

Maria Eugenia Berezin, Franck Rousseau, Andrzej Duda. Multichannel Virtual Access Points for Seamless Handoffs in IEEE 802.11 Wireless Networks. VTC 2011 - Vehicular Technology Conference, May 2011, Budapest, Hungary. pp.1-5, ⟨10.1109/VETECS.2011.5956552⟩. ⟨hal-00930970⟩