Fast Directional Handoff and lightweight retransmission protocol for enhancing multimedia quality in indoor WLANs

More and more mobile devices such as smartphones are being used with IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs (WLANs or Wi-Fi). However, mobile users are still experiencing poor service quality on the move due to the large handoff delay and packet loss problem. In order to reduce the delay, a new handoff scheme using the geomagnetic sensor embedded in mobile devices is proposed in this paper. The proposed scheme predicts the movement direction of a Mobile Station (MS) from the currently associated Access Point (AP) and performs active scanning with a reduced number of channels. In terms of the packet loss, a lightweight retransmission protocol is also proposed to minimize lost packets on Wi-Fi without producing a lot of acknowledgement packets. The proposed approaches are implemented on Android smartphones, and their performance is evaluated in a real indoor WLAN environment. The evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed schemes maintain seamless quality for real-time video even in an environment with frequent handoffs. Note that the proposed schemes are a client-only solution and do not require modification of the existing APs, which renders them very practical.