A Mobility Enhancement for Switched Wireless Ethernet with Soft Handoff

With the proliferation of mobile users, wireless LANs (WLANs) are quickly entering enterprise networks. These networks have traditionally been configured in a Shared Ethernet topology. Due to the tremendous performance increase over Shared Ethernet, most corporations’ networks are slowly being migrated to a Switched Ethernet topology. Traditional Ethernet switches will not suffice to completely take advantage of this WLAN technology. When WLAN’s use Ethernet switching as a backbone, service disruption may occur when attempting to migrate from one cell to another. This disruption does not occur on Shared Ethernet networks. The authors propose a soft handoff procedure to ensure optimal performance, minimal service disruption, as well as minimal broadcast frames.