Scanless Fast Handoff Technique Based on Global Path Cache for WLANs

Wireless LANs (WLANs) have been widely adopted and are more convenient as they are inter-connected as wireless campus networks and wireless mesh networks. However, timesensitive multimedia applications, which have become more popular, could suffer from long end-to-end latency in WLANs.This is due mainly to handoff delay, which in turn is caused by channel scanning. This paper proposes a technique called Global Path-Cache (GPC) that provides fast handoffs in WLANs.GPC properly captures the dynamic behavior of the network andMSs, and provides accurate next AP predictions to minimize the handoff latency. Moreover, the handoff frequencies are treated as time-series data, thus GPC calibrates the prediction models based on short term and periodic behaviors of mobile users. Our simulation study shows that GPC virtually eliminates the need to scan for APs during handoffs and results in much better overall handoff delay compared to existing methods.