Wi-Fi Access Point Roaming: Challenges and Potential Solutions

As functionalities in mobile devices have increased significantly in recent years, they have become primary means for staying connected through emails, instant messaging, voice and video calls. These services rely on mobile networks data connection or Wi-Fi connections which are cheaper and faster. They enable communications while moving from one location to another, but during the process of roaming the connections are predisposed to interruptions as the user gets out of the signal range. The current solution is to have multiple relay/repeater access points, nevertheless, short interruptions cause data integrity corruption and also use additional energy cost on the limited battery. To mitigate these issues, we propose a Wi-Fi roaming algorithm capable of automatically switching between access points while maintaining the data stream's integrity. After implementation and evaluation of the proposed solution, further refinements are introduced such as seamless transitioning from Wi-Fi to mobile data and vice versa.