Design and Performance Evaluation of a Handoff Algorithm for Mobile Devices in Wireless Vehicular Environments

In recent years, Wireless Mesh Networks have become an effective wireless technology to provide wireless connections in WLANs. As 802.11 networks go large-scale and even city wide, a lot of challenges occur. One of them is to guarantee seamless connectivity to users even if they are highly mobile. The existing IEEE 802.11 standard does not address the problem on how the handoff process should take place. In this thesis work we describe a handoff scheme optimized for networks providing connectivity to high speed mobile nodes within vehicular environments. Our proposed approach is implemented entirely on the client-side and focuses on the design of a reliable and optimized triggering procedure based on link quality prediction. We use a Simulation Framework to develop our algorithm and to plan a set of realistic scenarios in order to evaluate the performance of our solution and demonstrate its efficiency