LOHAS: LOad balancing with fast HAndoff Scheme on smartphones over IEEE 802.11 WLANs

Abstract

This paper presents a new scheme, LOad balancing with fast HAndoff Scheme (LOHAS), for IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) that reduces handoff delay and at the same time achieves load balancing among Access Points (APs). The key idea of LOHAS is in sharing AP information among Mobile Stations (MSs) and utilizing a sensor of smartphones. With LOHAS, MSs can reduce handoff delay by avoiding scanning the entire channels and also use traffic load of APs in the selection of the least loaded AP. LOHAS is implemented on a commercial smartphone and evaluated with field experiments, which show that LOHAS reduces the scanning delay of the handoff procedure by around 90\% and improves network performance significantly in terms of network throughput and packet loss ratio. In addition, an experimentation on video streaming is performed in order to demonstrate the practicability of LOHAS. LOHAS can be applied without any modifications to APs conforming to IEEE 802.11 standard.