Design and simulation of access router discovery process in mobile environments

With the development of mobile communications and Internet technologies, smart phones have become a necessity of life. To have better connection status, power consumption, and faster transmission speed, the most of mobile users want to access 802.11 wireless networks that are well known as a Wi-Fi. When entering a new area, a mobile host (MH) decides to use one of access routers (ARs) on available networks. However, since previous works are focused on layer 2 handoff for faster connection at 802.11, only the subsystem identification (SSID) and signal strength are considered to choose its new connection. This can fail to provide the MH with a suitable AR. Therefore, more information needs to be used to determine the suitable AR and seamless connectivity. In this paper, we extend a prefix information option in the router advertisement message to include the status information of an AR, such as status of the MH, capacity of the router, current load of the router, and depth of the network hierarchy. Also, we propose a decision engine by which the MH can analyze the status information of ARs and determine a suitable AR automatically based on the information. By analyzing our simulation results, we found that our AR discovery process has several advantages. For the MH, the packet loss can be reduced with the increase of wireless connection period. Additionally, load balancing was achieved for the AR and router, and the network topology was also able to become more efficient.