Effective Handover Process for Reliable Video Streaming Over Software-Defined Wireless Networking

Handover process plays a crucial role in a Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) with multiple Access Points (APs). To meet Quality of Service (QoS) or Quality of Experience (QoE) requirements for end-users, especially during video transmissions, such as real-time multimedia streaming or VoIP, the time required for handovers from one AP to another AP should be highly efficient; otherwise, end users may likely experience packet losses or longer delay, which leads to loss of significant information and degraded QoS/QoE. This paper discusses handover mechanisms using Software Defined Networking (SDN) for AP selection in a WLAN. The proposed approach enhances the existing handover process by considering both the received signal strength and load balancing of APs in order to provide better QoS/QoE during video transmissions over a Software-defined WLAN with multiple APs. A number of experiments have been performed using the Mininet-WiFi environment and the Ryu SDN controller. The results show that the proposed method improves QoS/QoE with lower delay, higher transmitted bytes, and visually higher quality video images.