An adaptive mobility manager for Software-Defined Enterprise WLANs

In current Enterprise WLANs (EWLANs), mobility management remains a challenging issue due to the rapid growth of mobile user number and varying traffic load. With conventional mobility managers, client handoff are based on signal strength of APs which often leads to imbalanced traffic load among APs. Software Defined Networking (SDN) has gained increasing popularity as a novel network architecture. Leveraging SDN to existing EWLANs, mobility management can be improved efficiently. In this paper, we present an adaptive mobility manager which utilises dynamic hysteresis of AP load to make handoff decisions. With proposed solution, network throughput is improved significantly compared to the conventional handoff algorithm.