AN OVERVIEW OF HANDOFF LATENCY IN IEEE 802.

11 Burra Venkata Durga Kumar School of Computer Technology Sunway University College, Malaysia burra@sunway.edu.my Abstract Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) have seen a good acceptance from both public and private sectors in recent years. They are being used in many companies, hot spots, universities and homes due to their ease of installation, reasonable prices, and the high data rates that they support. Uninterrupted connectivity is one of the important requirements in WLANs based IEEE 802.11 that provides mobility during the utilizing of the network; however, the handoff process when a station moves from its current base station range to another is still considered an issue in the IEEE 802.11 specification. This problem is especially considered critical for sensitive real-time applications such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) that can affect during the time consumed by handoff process. For this reason, many alternative handoff schemes have been proposed in order to support seamless handoff in WLANs. In this paper, author review the fundamentals of IEEE 802.11 standard based WLANs by providing a rich description of the standards commonly being used as well as the standard handoff procedure. Finally, a new framework is presented to reduce handoff latency based IEEE 802.11 standard by totally eliminating the scanning delay. Keywords: Handoff latency, Wireless local area networks (WLANs), Scanning, Reauthentication, and Re-association. 1. Introduction: This section firstly provides an overview of the WLANs, their currently deployed technologies as well as the critical effect of the handoff procedure of these WLANs on realtime applications. The section also presents the different IEEE 802.11 standards that are being deployed currently as well as some standards that are used to assist the handoff process. Finally the Introduction section discuses the handoff procedure currently being used by IEEE 802.11 mobile stations. 1.1 Handoff Procedure in IEEE 802.11

According to Kousalya et. al. (2008) the handoff process is divided into three stages which are scanning phase, re-authentication phase and re-association phase. 1.2. Scanning Phase

The scanning phase is the most critical phase in the handoff procedure since this phase is responsible for up to 90% of the overall handoff latency [1]. In this phase, the mobile station (eg. Laptop) monitors the available wireless channels to recognize the available APs. This stage can be divided into three sub phases namely detection, scanning and decision. In the detection sub-phase, the mobile station decides when the scanning phase needs to start. This is because a mobile station cannot continue communicating with its associated AP while
Proceedings of Regional Conference on Knowledge Integration in ICT 2010 479

it is discovering the available APs[2].However, in the scanning sub-phase, the mobile station starts to discover the APs that in its range and try to associate to one of them[3]. Since different APs operate on different channels, they might not be discovered by the mobile station which is operating on a different channel. However, by scanning all of those channels, a mobile station can discover these surrounding APs. IEEE 802.11 defines two scanning modes: passive where the mobile station simply waits for beacons, or active scanning where the mobile station actively solicits beacons [4]. In the last sub-phase, decision sub-phase, a mobile station determines which AP it needs to connect to [5]. The decision is dependent on several parameters such as the Received Signal Strength (RSS), available bandwidth, etc. If the difference between the RSS of the new AP and the old AP (current one) is higher than specific value, then the mobile station will handoff to the new AP [6] 2. Issues

The handoff latency in 802.11 based WLANs is a combination of three types of delays [7]. This section discusses each of these delays in details. 2.1 Scanning delay The scanning delay depends on which scanning mode is used. If passive scanning is used, the delay then is based on the number of channels as well as the beacon intervals. Thus, a long delay is introduced since the mobile station needs to stay in each channel for beacons interval as it might not know the arrival time of beacons shown in figure 1, messages A to D. For example, if the beacon interval is 200 ms, then the average scanning delay of IEEE 802.11b/g that has 11 channels is 2200 ms. However, if active scanning is used, the probe delay is a function of number of channels to scan as well as the time to stay on a channel to wait for the response messages from the APs. The time that the mobile station needs to wait for in each channel is based on two variables which are MinChannelTime and MaxChannelTime; the minimum and the maximum channel times, respectively [8]. 2.2 Authentication delay This type of delay represents the time needed during the exchange of authentication frames between the mobile station and the new selected AP. (see figure 1, messages E to F). Authentication delay varies based on the authentication mode used by the APs. The IEEE 802.11 standard (IEEE 802.11, 1999) specified two authentication modes; the open system authentication and shared key authentication. In the Open System authentication method, only two frames are required to be exchanged between the mobile station and the AP. However, in shared key mode additional frames are needed for the generation encryption key (total of 4 messages). Thus, using the shared key mode will cause longer authentication delay [9]. 2.3 Re-association Delay This delay is caused by exchanging re-association frames (re-association request & reassociation response) between the mobile station and the APs. In the re-association phase, the mobile station sends the re-association request frame to the new AP and receives the re-association response frame from it [7].

Proceedings of Regional Conference on Knowledge Integration in ICT 2010

480

Figure 1: The handoff delay by the IEEE 802.11 [10]. However, before the AP sends the re-association response frame back to the mobile station, it needs to collect the mobile stations context information from the old AP by using IAPP (see figure 1, messages G to H). As a result, using IAPP as extra delay to the re-association delay since four additional messages are exchanged between the old AP and the new AP in order to transfer mobile stations context information securely [10].

Proceedings of Regional Conference on Knowledge Integration in ICT 2010

481

3. Architecture As author have discussed in the previous section, the handoff latency in WLANs consists of three sub-delays which are Scanning, Authentication, and Re-association delays. MS: Mobile Station (eg. Laptop, PDA, etc.) New AP: The new Access Point that the MS wants to connect to. Old AP: The current Access Point that the MS is associated to. However, in this paper, author focus only on eliminating the Scanning delay. This is because the scanning delay contributes 90% of the total handoff delay and this can be considered very significant to the handoff process [4]. This section presents the existing Handoff Procedure in IEEE 802.11 based WLANs as well as the new mechanism presented by us which totally eliminates the scanning delay in IEEE 802.11 standard.

Proceedings of Regional Conference on Knowledge Integration in ICT 2010

482

Figure 2: Handoff procedure in IEEE 802.11 Figure 3: Handoff Procedure new mechanism 4. Proposed Mechanism

In this section, author presents the detailed work of new mechanism. Firstly, author present the needed model (Figure 4) that show how new mechanism is implemented. This will be
Proceedings of Regional Conference on Knowledge Integration in ICT 2010 483

followed by a flow chart complete Handoff Procedure using NEW Mechanism shown in Figure 5.

V.

NEW Model

Figure 4: Sequence Diagram: Indicate Handoff. MS: Mobile Station (eg. Laptop, PDA, etc.) New AP: The new Access Point that the MS wants to connect to. Old AP: The current Access Point that the MS is associated to.
Proceedings of Regional Conference on Knowledge Integration in ICT 2010 484

Figure 5: Flow Chart: Complete Handoff Procedure using NEW Mechanism

Proceedings of Regional Conference on Knowledge Integration in ICT 2010

485

5.

Conclusion

Handoff latency in IEEE 802.11 is a critical issue that affects a lot of WLANs real time applications such VoIP. In order to have uninterrupted connectivity, the total handoff delay needs not exceed 50ms. In this paper, author have presented the currently used handoff scheme based IEEE 802.11. However, this scheme has got some problems due to that fact it consumes a significant delay to degrade the real time applications performance. For this reason, author has also developed a new scheme called new model that could eliminate 90% of this delay and improve the performance of the IEEE 802.11 standard. This model is able to eliminate the scanning delay by having each AP build a list of its neighbors APs as soon it is operational. This list will be sent to the associated MS as it is needed in order to provide that MS with the list of all APs that it may visit during the handoff. This would eliminate the need for the MS to search for APs during the handoff process. Furthermore, This new model also takes an advantage of the Power Management bit to provide a new feature to the IEEE 802.11 standard which is the power save mode. In the power save mode, a MS can switch to standby mode if there are no data packets are being sent to it. This can significantly improve the performance of the MSs since the wireless connectively consumes lots of power to these limited power devices such as PDAs and Laptops. 6. Recommendations

Even though this new model has eliminated 90% of the handoff latency, there is still possible work to be done to improve the functionality of the proposed new mechanism in order to reduce the handoff delay to more than 90%. This can be done by reducing or eliminating the authentication and re-association delays described previously. Moreover, another possible future work could be the support of new model to layer-3 mobility. This is because this research focuses on layer-2 mobility (that is, a handoff in the same WLANS). However, it is still possible to incorporate such mechanism to layer-3 mobility so that it would support handoff procedures when a MS moves from one network to another. References [1]. Chintala & Zeng,(2007). "Novel MAC Layer Handoff Schemes for IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs," Proceedings of the proceedings of the IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference 2007 (WCNC07), Hong Kong, Liao & Gao, (2006). Practical Schemes for Smooth MAC Layer Handoff in 802.11Wireless Networks Mishra et al., (2002). Probabilistic location prediction for a mobile station Walke et al., (2006). Enhancing handoff process using IAPP with caching techniques. J. Applied Sci
486

[2]. [3]. [4].

Proceedings of Regional Conference on Knowledge Integration in ICT 2010

[5]. Navarro & Wong, (2006). Comparison between Vertical Hand- off Decision Algorithm for Heterogeneous Wireless Networks, in Proc. VTC-2006. Vo. 2, pp. 947 951 [6]. Funn, (2008). 'Smart Checking System'. -. Siti Munirah Bt Abd Latiff, ... Fakrulradzi Idris, 'Handoff Latency in Mobile IPv6' [7]. Pack et al, (2007). Handoff latency results in packet losses and severe End-to-End TCP performance degradation ... Campbell, A. T. et al. Comparison of IP MicroMobility Protocols. ... IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, v.6 n.8, p.903-914 [8]. Tsao & Cheng, (2007). Improving Channel Scanning Procedures for WLAN Handoffs [9]. Wang & Bao, (2005). Simulation results show that Personal AP can greatly reduce the handoff latencies, and is suitable to support delay-sensitive [10]. Mishra et al., 2004 and Wang & Bao, (2005). San Diego, California, USA. 2nd Annual International Conference on Mobile and ... PPP Migration: A Technique for Low-Latency Handoff in CDMA2000 Networks

Proceedings of Regional Conference on Knowledge Integration in ICT 2010

487