An Adaptive and Preemptive Algorithm for Faster Handoffs in WLAN

Vijay Ukani and M. M. Gore

Computer Science and Engineering Department
Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology
Allahabad-211004, Uttar Pradesh, India
vijayukani@yahoo.com, goremm@acm.org

Abstract

IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs have shown enormous

growth in recent times. Due to the mobility promises
shown by them, seamless roaming has become a critical
component of the whole deployment. A handoff occurs
when a Mobile Station (MS) moves away from trans-
mission range of one Access Point (AP) and enters into
transmission range of another AP. The current handoff
procedure does not satisfy the jitter requirements for real
time multimedia applications like VoIP[7]. In this pa-
per we propose a new handoff algorithm which reduces
handoff latency to an extent to be seamlessly bearable by
a multimedia application. We reduce the search phase
latency by periodically scanning channels one at a time
and caching the results. The cached results can be used
be used for future handoff management.
1 Introduction
Wireless network facilitates mobility with high speed
information access. It has led to rapid growth in number
of IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN deployments for inter-
net and local network access. There are currently three
IEEE 802.11 WLAN standards[1]: 802.11a, 802.11b,
and 802.11g. The IEEE 802.11a operates in 5 GHz ISM
band and has 32 channels. The 802.11b and 802.11g op-
erates in 2.4 GHz ISM band and use 11 of possible 14
channels. Of these 11 channels only 3 do not overlap in
frequency range as shown in figure 1. In this paper we
are concerned with IEEE 802.11b.
The IEEE 802.11 WLAN operates in two modes viz,
Infrastructure and Ad-hoc mode. In Ad-hoc mode there
is no central entity. Whenever two MSs come in com-
munication range of each others, after detecting each
other they establish a peer-to-peer communication link
between them.
In Infrastructure mode of WLAN, there are APs act-
ing as Base Stations which makes a single point of com-
munication for all MS associated to it. The MSs and its
associated AP forms a Basic Service Set(BSS). The BSS
can be extended by connecting APs through a Distribu-
Figure 1. Channel Layout of 802.11b WLAN
tion System (DS) to form Extended Service Set(ESS).
Whenever an MS roams across APs, it makes hand-
off from current AP to a new AP in the range. During a
handoff the MS leaves the association with old AP and
establishes a new association with new AP. This process
of locating a new AP and associating with it, generates
latency. This latency may be long enough to break the
ongoing communication or induce delay in transmis-
sion, which is not acceptable for real time multimedia
applications. In this paper a new algorithm is proposed
with which we were able to limit the handoff latency to a
level where even VoIP application can work seamlessly.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Sec-
tion 2 details the operation of 802.11b WLAN, focusing
on the handoff procedure and the related terms. Section
3 describes the existing methodologies to reduce hand-
off latency in 802.11 WLAN. In section 4, a new algo-
rithm for performing the handoff is presented. Section 5
demonstrates the simulation scenario and section 6 pro-
vides results and analysis. Finally, in section 7 some
concluding remarks and scope for future work is pre-
sented.
2 The Handoff Process and Related Ter-
minology
As per ethernet technologies, roaming domain would
mean a network, that connects devices that are capable
of sending and receiving broadcast frames to and from

1
one another. This domain is sometimes referred to as
layer 2 network. In case of 802.11, APs that are in the
same broadcast domain and configured with the same
service set identifier(SSID) are said to be in the same
roaming domain. IEEE 802.11 natively supports layer
2 roaming ie. roaming within roaming domain or be-
tween APs having same SSID. 802.11 MAC does not
support inter domain roaming as it is layer 3 roaming
and 802.11 MAC is layer 3 unaware. This doesn’t mean
layer 3 roaming is impossible with 802.11, some upper
layer solutions like Mobile IP are required. The roam-
ing user can maintain application connectivity as long
as its layer 3 address does not change[5], which does
not change in layer 2 roaming. Here, in this paper we
are concentrating on layer 2 roaming.
In the Infrastructure-based network, when an MS
moves away from associated AP, the signal strength and
signal-to-noise ratio decreases and at some point it falls
below predefined threshold. This situation triggers MS
to initiate handoff. The MAC layer handoff process can Figure 2. The Handoff Process using Ac-
be divided into three distinct phases: Probe, Authentica- tive Scan
tion, and Reassociation phase.
The probe phase can be further categorized into 2
sub-phases: Detection and Search phase. In detection probe phase. So passive scan is not suitable as well as
phase, the MS is responsible for detecting the need for recommended for faster handoff.
handoff. Whenever an MS detects lack of activity on its After locating an AP in the range the MS should au-
transceiver, the possible reasons for this could be a col- thenticate itself to the new AP by sending an Authenti-
lision, temporary signal fading or AP out of range [11]. cation Request frame. The AP either accepts or rejects
The MS has to decide the possible reason and whether the identity of MS by sending an authentication response
or not to go for handoff. frame.
In the search phase, after deciding to make handoff After being authenticated the MS tries to reassociate
the MS should search the potential AP to which it can with the new AP by sending a reassociation request to
associate. This could be done by the MAC layer scan the new AP. The new AP then sends a reassociation re-
function. Scanning can be accomplished in either Active sponse back to MS indicating the acceptance or rejection
or Passive mode. In active scan the MS starts scanning and using Inter Access Point Protocol(IAPP), it commu-
for AP by broadcasting a probe request frame on one nicates with old AP for MS credentials and any buffered
channel and waits for the probe response frame till min- frames.
ChannelTime and if no probe responses are heard dur- It has been already proved in [8] that authentication
ing this interval then assuming that no APs are present process takes negligible time. Reassociation phase delay
on this channel, it tunes its transceiver onto next channel is also very small as compared to probe delay. Probe
and repeats the same procedure. Else if probe responses delay makes up almost 90% of the total handoff latency.
were received till minChannelTime then it further waits So here we are concentrating on improving the probe
till maxChannelTime, waiting and collecting more probe phase algorithm so as to reduce total handoff latency.
responses. After collecting all the probe responses, it
starts scanning the next channel. After scanning all the
channels, process all the received probe responses to de- 3 Related Work
termine the potential AP. This scenario is illustrated in
figure 2. A lot of work has been done to reduce the hand-
In passive scan mode the MS tunes its transceiver on off latency when roaming across the roaming domain.
one channel and passively listens to the beacons trans- Many new schemes for Mobile IP have been proposed
mitted by the APs on that channel and after beacon in- for roaming between Wireless LANs. Here the focus is
terval has elapsed move to next channel. Using the infor- on roaming within the roaming domain ie. layer 2 roam-
mation contained in the beacon frames the MS decides ing.
to connect to an AP. The MS has to wait on each channel Sangho Shin and A.S. Rawat in [10] focused on re-
for beacon interval as more than one AP may be oper- ducing handoff latency by using selective scanning and
ating on one channel. Also standard makes it compul- caching mechanism. The idea is to scan selected chan-
sory to scan all channels, passive scan tends to lengthen nels instead of all available channels in a single active

2
scan. A channel mask is used to select a specific sub-
set of channels to be scanned, thus reducing the probe
latency. Caching is the other technique used to further
reduce the probe latency. The results of active scan are
cached. This cached results are used for future hand-
off. Next time whenever MS wants to make handoff, it
tries to locate an AP from the cache and try to reasso-
ciate with it. If not successful then again start selective
scanning. This procedure reduces the probe phase la-
tency but in any case the active scan has to be executed
completely at least once, resulting into longer latency
during that scan. As well as the selected channels are
to be scanned at a stretch, during a handoff, thus the re-
sulting delay would be sum of scan delay of the selected
channels.
A selective channel scanning mechanism was pro-
posed by Hye-Soo Kin and Sung-Jea Ko [4], in which
MS need not scan all channels during active scan but
only the channels selected by neighbour graph of APs.
In this approach also active scan of selected channel
is involved, where in the selected channels are to be
scanned in a single scan.
While designing any handoff algorithm, the higher
error rate of WLAN should be taken into consideration.
The IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol recommends active
scanning for handoff process. The probe phase delay
may increase considerably if a probe request or probe
response packet is lost on the transit. A reliable ac-
tive scanning procedure is proposed by Wei Li, Qing-
An Zeng and D.P. Agrawal in [6]. The algorithm detects
the loss of probe request and retransmits it and it assigns
higher priority to management frames as compared to
data frames.
Hector Velayos and Gunnar Karlsson in [11] focused
on reducing the detection phase, search phase and exe-
cution phase. The detection phase detects the need for
handoff. This phase can be reduced by reacting quickly
to packet losses and by using shorter beacon interval, in
case of passive scanning. They tried to reduce the search
phase by using active scanning instead of passive scan-
ning.
A. Mishra and W. Arbaugh in [8] described the de-
tailed handoff process. They experimentally measured
various components of the handoff process and proved
that probe phase contributes dominantly in overall hand-
off latency, making almost 90% of it, while authentica-
tion and association phase contributing in few millisec-
onds. Here in the proposed approach we try to reduce
the probe phase latency. F. A. Gonzalez and Jesus A.
Perez in [2], suggested an accurate strategy for measur-
ing actual handoff latency. They distinguished handoff
latency from disconnection time and showed that actual
disconnection time is very less as compared to handoff
time.
Most of the work described above are based on com-
plete or selective active scanning. There are certain
drawbacks when using complete/selective active scan-
3
ning. Complete/selective scanning needs to scan all the
available/selected channels. Each channel scan adds
channel scan delay to probe latency. A new algorithm
is presented in section 4, which aims at resolving this
drawback and further improving the probe phase latency.
4 The Proposed Approach
In active scanning, MS has to spend minChannel-
Time or maxChannelTime on each channel, depending
on channel activity. Thus the time spent on each channel
may vary. In case of selective channel scan, the num-
ber of channels to be scanned may vary, resulting into
variable latency. If N is the number of channels to be
scanned, then Probe Time (PT ) could be delimited by
N * minChannelTime < PT < N * maxChannelTime.
The values of minChannelTime and maxChannelTime
is very crucial in calculating the total handoff latency.
Two threshold power levels are defined viz Periodic
threshold and Handoff threshold. If received power
level of any frame (data or beacon), falls below Peri-
odic threshold (TP ), the MS should start periodic active
scan immediately. This is an indicator to the MS about
the future handoff. Handoff threshold (TH ) is the power
level, which when reached indicates that there is need to
execute handoff procedure now. Handoff threshold (TH )
is defined in such a way that MS gets sufficient time to
execute handoff procedure before leaving communica-
tion range of an AP. The communication range of an AP
or MS is decided by the a threshold power level(T). The
AP or MS drops a frame if it is received with power level
below T.
Propagation measurements in a mobile radio chan-
nel show that the average received signal strength at any
point decays as a power law of distance of separation be-
tween transmitter and receiver[9]. The average received
power Pr at a distance d from the transmitting antenna
is approximated by
d −pLE
p r = p0 ( ) (1)
d0
where p0 is received power level at a distance d0 be-
tween transmitter and receiver. pLE is the path loss ex-
ponent.
4.1 Estimation of TH & TP
TH is the power level which when attained, the MS
should start executing the authentication and association
procedure with the selected AP. The procedure should
be completed before leaving the coverage area of cur-
rent AP. The maximum time taken for authentication and
reassociation phase is calculated experimentally. This
is the minimum time MS must spend within the com-
munication range, after receiving frames with power
TH . Assuming the maximum speed with which an MS
can move, the distance (d) inside transmission range of
an AP can be calculated as shown in figure 3. Power
level at this point would be TH . Knowing the trans-
mission range(d0 ), threshold power level(T), and d, TH
can be calculated using equation 1. The procedure is
Figure 3. Relationship between T, TH ,and
TP
made adaptive by dynamically calculating the value of
TP . TP is the periodic threshold below which MS
should start scanning the channels periodically. It is a
function of number of channels to be scanned periodi-
cally(maxChanAllowed), the ScanPeriod, and the speed
at which MS is moving away from AP. Its value should
be set such that MS has sufficient time to periodically
scan all channels to be scanned before reaching dh . The
speed is estimated by measuring received power level of
last 10 beacons and the time at which beacons are re-
ceived. The distance inside dh , as shown in figure 3, at
which periodic scan should start can be given by
dist = speed∗(ScanP eriod+SD)∗maxChanAllowed
(2)
where SD is the maximum time taken by MS to scan one
channel. So the distance from AP where power level
is TP can be given by dp = dh - dist. Using equation
1, TP can be calculated. If MS is moving with vary-
ing speed, the value of TP is updated at receipt of each
beacon frame thus making the algorithm adaptive to the
situation.
4.2 Algorithm
Following are the notations used in the proposed al-
gorithm.
TH :- Handoff threshold
TP :- Periodic threshold
maxChanAllowed :- Number of channels allowed to be
scanned
ScanPeriod :- Periodic scan interval
channelList:- Array of preferred channels
4
channelIndex:- Index of channel scanned from channel-
List array
Algorithm 1 The Proposed Algorithm
Initialization Phase:
1 Initialize channelList=1,6,11,2,3,4,5,7,8,9,10
2 channelIndex = 0
Periodic Active Scan Phase:
3 Monitor received power of all frames including beacons
4 if (receivedPower < TP && receivedPower > TH )
5 Start active scan for channel with channelList index
= channelIndex
6 if(AP is detected till minChannelTime)
7 collect probe responses till maxChannelTime
and
8 store entries for each AP in cache, sorted accord-
ing to received power
9 associate back with previously associated AP
10 else
11 shift the channel to end of channelList
12 associate back with previously associated AP
13 channelIndex = channelIndex + 1
repeat steps 4-13 at an interval of ScanPeriod
Reassociation Phase:
14 else if(receivedPower < TH )
check cache
15 if(any entry present in cache for that AP)
16 try to reassociate with 1st AP
17 if(Succeeded)
18 completed
19 else
20 try to reassociate next AP until all entries
are tried
21 else
22 start complete active scanning
23 Continuously receive beacon frames and keep updating
TP .
The algorithm can be divided into three phases as ini-
tialization phase, periodic active scan phase, and reasso-
ciation phase. In the initialization phase, each MS ini-
tializes a channelList for each AP, wherein the channels
are arranged in order of preference. Initially the chan-
nelList contains all the channels with channel 1,6, and
11 as the first three channel(as there are more chances of
an AP present there). When MS moves away from AP,
the Signal Strength(SS) of received frames decreases.
MS continuously monitors the received power of all
frames(data and beacons). When it falls below TP , MS
starts periodic channel scan by scanning first channel
from channelList. This channelList array is updated at
every channel scan. If a channel is found idle during
minChannelTime it gets shifted at the end of the list.
Thus building a list of channels in channelList, arranged
in the order of preference.
The MS stores the positive results of periodic channel
scan in cache. The AP cache consists of a table which
uses current MAC address as the key. Corresponding to
each entry in the table the MAC of adjascent AP along-
with the channel is stored. Other fields are the received
Signal Strength and SSID. The AP cache has a size of
eight. We are limiting the entries per AP to eight, mean-
ing that for each AP it can store details of eight adjas-
cent APs. The cache entries are invalidated as as soon a
handoff occurs.
After minChannelTime or maxChannelTime, de-
pending on presence of an AP on that channel, the MS
again associates back to the previously associated AP,
thus resuming the communication from where it had
stopped. The breakage of communication due to the
this periodic channel scan is either minChannelTime or
maxChannelTime plus the reassociation delay, needed
to associate back to previous AP. The suggested opti-
mal values, deduced from previous experiments, are ap-
proximately 6.5ms for minChannelTime and 11ms for
maxChannelTime [12]. The simulation results shows
that the time taken to reassociate is approximately 3-
4ms. Thus the latency generated from this would be less
than the jitter bearable by most jitter critical application
like VoIP. (The maximum unnoticeable jitter for VoIP
is 40ms [7]). The above procedure is repeated periodi-
cally untill specified number of channels (MaxChanAl-
lowed) are scanned one by one or the handoff threshold
TH has reached. When the received power level of bea-
cons or data packets falls below TH , the MS makes use
of the cache to find an AP with maximum power level
and tries to associate with it. If association is successful,
the to and fro traffic will be routed through the new AP.
In case of failure to associate the MS tries to look for
next best AP and try reassociating with it. This proce-
dure is repeated untill all APs in the cache are tried.
5 Simulation
We have chosen OMNeT++ as simulation environ-
ment. The reasons for choosing OMNeT++ can be
found in [3]. Above OMNeT++, IPv6SuiteWithINET
model containing IEEE 802.11 WLAN MAC layer im-
plementation is being used. The simulation scenario has
three APs, connected through a distribution system. The
parameters used for the simulations are summarized be-
low:
Parameter Value
Threshold Power -96 dBm
Handoff Threshold Power -95.476 dBm
minChannelTime 6.5 ms
maxChannelTime 11 ms
maxChanAllowed 11
When MS initially boots up, using complete active
scan, it associates with an AP. During the movement, it
initiates a handoff. The Handoff time is measured as
difference between the time at which received power of
MS falls below TH and the time at which reassociation
response from new AP is received. During this time the
MS retrieves best AP entry from the cache and authenti-
cates itself with the found AP. Also it sends reassociation
request to AP and waits for reassociation response.
5
The packet delay can be measured by sending a
stream of data from MS to a wired station while it moves
from one AP to another. This is done by using a ping
application, sending ICMP requests at regular intervals.
The round trip time of response packets were traced to
find out the packet delay due to periodic channel scan
and handoff.
6 Results and Analysis
The main result found is that the MS will not perceive
any interruption in applications like VoIP as the hand-
off time obtained from the simulation results is very less
compared to acceptable jitter. The handoff time is ap-
proximately 3 ms on most occasion except one in figure
4. During that handoff, the MS tries to associate with
best AP from cache but failed to do so, as it has moved
away from that AP now. So it finds the next best AP
and associates with it. Thus increasing the delay. The
Figure 4. Handoff Delay
actual break in communication would be more than the
handoff time while scanning individual channels peri-
odically. The actual time taken for scanning a channel
is highly dependant on minChannelTime and maxChan-
nelTime. Practically the values of minChannelTime and
maxChannelTime would vary for different vendors, thus
varying the communication break. By taking the optimal
values of minChannelTime and maxChannelTime this
delay can be controlled. The results are demonstrated
in 5.
The packet delay is measured as the round trip time
of ping request, sent from MS to a wired station. The
minimum delay occurs during normal association, and
it seems to be around 0.4 ms. Maximum delay occurs
during handoff or periodic channel scan, so it is always
around 11 ms or more. The maximum delay recorded
is 15.26 ms, which is due to periodic active scan for a
channel on which AP is present. The readings are taken
as minimum, average and maximum delay for 6 experi-
ments and average of these experiments as shown in fig-
ure 6.

Figure 5. Channel Scan Delay due to Peri-
odic Scan
Figure 6. Packet Delay
7 Conclusion and Future Scope
We have measured, analyzed and suggested means to
reduce the MAC layer handoff latency by using periodic
channel scan and caching the results, instead of every-
time scanning channels actively. We have shown that
using periodic scan, the possible APs for future hand-
off can be stored in cache. Cache access and associ-
ating with AP, found from cache, is very fast resulting
into very small handoff latency. Also by taking periodic
threshold as function of speed and number of channels
to be scanned periodically, the algorithm is adaptive to
the situation.
The AP prediction can be further improved by con-
sidering direction of movement instead of only power
level and maintaining the results in cache throughout
lifetime of MS. The handoff time can be further re-
duced by using pre-authentication as the authentication
algorithm. The algorithm can be made more adaptive
by dynamically choosing the number of channels to
be scanned periodically as all the channels with APs
present on it would be placed near the head in the chan-
nelList after one periodic scan.
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