A performance study of roaming in wireless local area networks based on IEEE 802.11r
Hassan Ahmed, Hossam S. Hassanein · 2008
The wide deployment of IEEE 802.11 based wireless local area networks (WLANs), and increased interest in multimedia applications support in WLANs, have lead to the need to support real-time applications even when devices are roaming across WLAN access points (APs). This has lead to the development of the IEEE 802.11r fast roaming mechanism, in which a connection to a candidate AP is established before the loss of connectivity with the current one. In this paper, we study the performance of the IEEE 802.11r and its viability for real-time applications. Our simulation results demonstrate the flexibility of the IEEE 802.11r and the effectiveness of its roaming procedure. Also, a noticeable reduction in roaming time and delays at APs is shown to be achievable, which guarantees the required quality of service level of Voice over IP over WLAN (VoWLAN) applications.