A Novel Scheme for Seamless Hand-off in WMNs

Although current wireless mesh network (WMN) applications experience a perceptually uninterrupted hand-off, their throughput after the hand-off event may be significantly degraded due to the low available bandwidth of the mobile client's new master. In this paper, we propose a novel mobility management scheme for 802.11-based WMNs that enables both seamless hand-off for transparent communications, and bandwidth awareness for stable application performance after the hand-off process. To facilitate this, we (i) present a new buffer moment in support of the fast Layer-2 hand-off mechanism to cut the packet loss incurred in the hand-off process to zero and (ii) design a dynamic admission control to grant joining accepts to mesh clients. We evaluate the benefits and drawbacks of the proposal for both UDP and TCP traffic, as well as the fairness of the proposal. Our results show that the new scheme can not only minimize hand-off latency, but also maintain the current application rates of roaming users by choosing an appropriate new master for joining.