Selective Active Scanning for Fast Handoff in WLAN Using Sensor Networks

Seamless connectivity in wireless access networks is critical for timesensitive applications requiring Quality-of-Service guarantees with bounded data transmission delay. Currently, the latency inherent in the handoff process can preclude the successful delivery of such applications by introducing delays up to several seconds. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing an improvement of the access points discovery process at the data link layer. We present a novel WLAN architecture using an overlay sensor network as a control plane. By distributing the information on the current network status to the sensor nodes, we show that handoff latency can be significantly reduced.