SERO: A model-driven seamless roaming framework for wireless mesh network with multipath TCP

While modern wireless devices are capable of using multiple WiFi interfaces, the Multipath TCP (MPTCP) protocol has been employed to make full use of the capacity of many radios by enabling multiple path communication simultaneously. To provide exceptional mobility support in wireless networks, a key question is to determine the best handoff strategy to switch between access points or among WiFi/3G interfaces during roaming. In this paper, we propose SERO, a novel model-driven SEamless ROaming framework to optimize layer-2 handoff and vertical handoff for multihomed devices using MPTCP. The proposed framework adopts a measurement-based method to derive the TCP throughput model for wireless communication during handoff. Based on the throughput model, we propose a hybrid handoff strategy that uses multiple WiFi interfaces for data transmission and employs 3G augmentation to bridge the network interruption caused by handoff and to guarantee the total throughput above a predefined threshold for roaming devices. We implement the SERO framework in a real-deployed wireless mesh network testbed, and evaluate its performance by extensive experiments, which shows that SERO achieves performance gain of 26%-180% compared with several existing handoff strategies.