SWITCH: SDN-WLAN Integrated Handover Scheme for QoS-Guaranteed Mobile Service

The handover procedure of IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs) introduces significant delay, which can degrade the quality of service (QoS) especially for delay-sensitive applications. Although studies have been conducted to support handover in SDN-based WLAN, there is no research to reduce the channel scanning procedure that takes up the most delay time in the handover process. The channel scanning procedure is essential to determine the appropriate access point (AP). To mitigate this problem, this paper proposes a SWITCH: SDN-WLAN integrated handover scheme for QoS-Guaranteed mobile service. In SWITCH, each AP periodically broadcasts beacon frames through different channels in a predetermined order that includes the operating channel information of the AP. This allows mobile stations (MSs) to receive the beacon frames of nearby APs, and therefore they can determine the appropriate APs for handover without the channel scanning procedure. By reporting the information of the newly moved AP to the SDN controller, a flow rule is installed in advance to provide fast handover, and packet loss is reduced by buffering data destined for MS. In addition, the proposed scheme can adaptively operate SWITCH to consider the user location and QoS requirement of flow to save radio resource overhead. Performance evaluation results demonstrate that SWITCH can reduce the handover delays, flow table utilization ratio and radio resource overhead while improving the network throughput.