Wireless Mobility Management with Prediction, Delay Reduction and Resource Management in 802.11 Networks

In 802.11 wireless infrastructure networks, as the mobile node moves from one access point to another, the active connections will not be badly dropped if the handoff is smooth and if there are sufficient resources reserved in the target access point. In a 5x5 grid of access points, within a 6x6 grid of regions, by location tracking and data mining, we predict the mobility pattern of mobile node with good accuracy. The pre-scanning of mobile nodes, along with pre-authenticating neighbouring access points and pre-reassociation is used to reduce the scan delay, authentication delay and re-association delay respectively. The model implements first stage reservation by using prediction results and does second stage reservation based on the packet content type, so that sufficient resources can be reserved when the mobile node does the handoff to the next access point. The overall mobility management scheme thus reduces the handoff delay. The performance simulations are done to verify the proposed model.