A seamless handoff mechanism for DHCP-based IEEE 802.11 WLANs

Abstract

IEEE 802.11 wireless networks have gained great popularity. However, handoff is always a critical issue in this area. In this paper, we propose a novel seamless handoff mechanism for IEEE 802.11 wireless networks which support IEEE 802.11i security standard. Our approach consists of a Dynamic Tunnel Establishing procedure and a seamless handoff mechanism. Both intra- and inter-subnet handoff cases are considered in our seamless handoff approach. Our work focuses on handoffs in DHCP-based IP networks rather than Mobile IP-supported networks, but the proposed scheme can be easily tailored to Mobile IP-supported networks.