Qualitative Study of Intelligent Access Point Handover in WLAN Systems

Wireless Local Area Network access points are being used extensively by mobile users. Therefore an intelligent mechanism is needed to allow mobile devices to switch between access points when a particular access point is heavily congested with network traffic. This is to allow users to perceive a better Quality of Service. This paper describes the qualitative study of using an intelligent access point handover mechanism in a Wireless Local Area Network. Experimentations were conducted using an intelligent access point switching prototype to obtain users perception for video conferencing quality before and after applying the intelligent access point handover mechanism. To evaluate the performance and the benefits of the handover mechanism, we present the experimentation results.