Wi-Fi Goes to Town: A Predictive, Re-association Free System for Wi-Fi Roaming across Access Points

Abstract

Use of wireless communication is steadily rising, forcing users to balance both cellular and Wi-Fi options. The latter option o ers higher bandwidth and faster speeds, but su ers from poor roaming: moving between Wi-Fi networks still leads to dropped connections and a poor experience. Existing research has proposed solutions from updating the 802.11 spec- i cation to using MultipathTCP; however, these all require that client devices have updated software supporting the solution. We believe there is room for a wireless system that automat- ically transitions clients between access points with no reconnection and no delay, allowing clients to always connect with the closest. Initial tests show that this system does allow for 4x higher TCP throughput especially as a client devices moves from one access point to an- other, compared to a control test that tried to maintain a connection to the original AP. With further development, this solution can eventually help improve Wi-Fi roaming performance, allowing for applications in high-speed scenarios, such as metropolitan subway tunnels.