A Neighborhood Awareness Method for Handoff Assistance in 802.11 Wireless Networks

Fast and efficient handoff is one of the foremost requirements of the 802.11 based wireless networks due to their limited range. Prior knowledge of the neighbouring Access points (AP) can assist a mobile station (STA) in making a fast and accurate handoff decision. Dissemination of the neighbouring AP information to all the STA attached to a given AP is a challenging task and should be accomplished without making any changes to the 802.11 standards or huge client/AP modifications or computational complexity keeping in view the backward compatibility issues. We have proposed a new method of providing neighbouring AP channel information to the STA. STA can use this information in conjunction with the syncscan[2] to achieve faster hand off. This approach promises to provide lower signalling overheads in comparison to the traditional syncscan and is also backwardly compatible with the conventional handoff approaches