A Quantitative Analysis of Handover Time at MAC Layer for Wireless Mobile Networks

Extensive studies have been carried out for reducing the handover time of wireless mobile network at medium access control (MAC) layer. However, none of them show the impact of reduced handover time on the overall performance of wireless mobile networks. This paper presents a quantitative analysis to show the impact of reduced handover time on the performance of wireless mobile networks. The proposed quantitative model incorporates many critical performance parameters involve in reducing the handover time for wireless mobile networks. In addition, we analyze the use of active scanning technique with comparatively shorter beacon interval time in a handoff process. Our experiments verify that the active scanning can reduce the overall handover time at MAC layer if comparatively shorter beacon intervals are utilized for packet transmission. The performance measures adopted in this paper for experimental verifications are network throughput under different network loads