earticle

영어

In order to provide the Mobile Stations operating in IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN network with seamless handover, a comprehensive study on the functions of handover considering various networking environments and characteristics of Mobile Stations is required. Note that the channel scan process finding a new AP takes the major portion of handover time, and this is the most significant issue with seamless handover for real-time multimedia service in WLAN environment. In this paper the functions required to provide seamless handover in IEEE 802.11 WLAN network are identified, and a new scanning technique is proposed with which the Mobile Stations can selectively scan the channels to reduce the channel scan time in various network environments. Here each Mobile Station awares of the channels the neighbor APs are using by scanning them in advance according to the proposed technique. Afterwards, when handover is actually required, the optimal AP is decided quickly by scanning only the predetemined group of channels and order of scan without unnecessary scan of all the channels.