An improved mobility management technique for IEEE 802.11 based WLAN by predicting the direction of the mobile node

Abstract

In wireless local area network (WLAN), mobility management becomes a sophisticated issue of research due to the limited coverage of the Access Points (AP). For the successful communication between the mobile nodes (MN), every node should be connected with an access point (AP) during their operating mode, irrespective of their mobility. When a MN travels into the coverage area of its current AP, no special technique is required to maintain the connectivity. But when a MN travels out of the coverage area of its current AP and tries to associate with another AP, a delay occurs during the handover of connection which leads to a failure of connection. Throughout the last few years plenty of researches had been done to reduce this handover delay by reducing the scanning delay as the scanning process causes 90% of the total handover delay. In this paper, we propose a new scanning technique where the most potential AP is chosen according to the direction of the MN. First, we fit a polynomial equation along the trajectory of its motion and then to predict the direction of motion, we analyze the slope of the trajectory. Our simulation results show the effectiveness and accuracy of our proposed scheme in practical field.