A Review on Handoff Latency Reducing Techniques in IEEE 802.11 WLAN

Wireless communication plays a significant role in our life as it provides mobility and flexibility as well as scalability. Handoff delays make a serious problem. A lot of research has been done in last few years to reduce the handoff delays occur in the different levels of wireless communication. Due to the mobility of devices handoff is an important aspect in WLAN and cellular communications and in WLAN this aspect is much more important due to limited range of APs, WLAN also provides sufficient bandwidth for real time streaming services. In the literature a number of handoff schemes have been proposed to reduce the handoff latency and support fast handoff in IEEE 802.11 wireless networks. In this article, we review these fast handoff schemes and analyze their advantages and disadvantages qualitatively. Our aim is to make available groundwork for future research on reducing the handoff latency for intelligent transport systems (ITS) in vehicular scenarios and give emphasis on requirement of fast handover for seamless connectivity. We comprise here various techniques to reduce handoff delays. Some future research ideas are also suggested here