Moxa White Paper

High Speed Roaming for Better Mobility

Dana Lee, Senior Product Manager
dana.lee@moxa.com
Moxa Industrial Wireless Division

Introduction
Is slow roaming speed between your mobile networks access
points hindering your industrial applications performance? If
so, then high speed roaming may be the solution youre looking
for. In this paper, we discuss two ways to give your roaming
speed an extra boost by unlocking the power of high speed
roaming for mobile applications.
y Roaming by Signal
y Roaming by Channel

What is Roaming?
In mobile applications that involve multiple access points
(APs), roaming (also called handover) refers to when a client
moves between two or more access points, and the speed of
the mechanism used to effect the roaming mechanism can be
crucial to a projects success.

As the client physically moves from one AP to another, the

signal strength of the first AP will drop while the signal strength
of the second AP will increase. When the signal strength of the
first AP drops below the signal strength of the second AP, we
say that the client has roamed to the second AP.

Released on September 15, 2009

Copyright 2009 Moxa Inc. All rights reserved.

Moxa manufactures a wide array of device networking products for industrial automation. Information about all
Moxa products, which include embedded computers, Ethernet switches, wireless solutions, serial device servers,
multiport serial boards, media converters, USB-to-serial converters, embedded device servers, video networking
products, and industrial I/O solutions, is available on Moxa's corporate website at www.moxa.com.
How to contact Moxa
Tel: 1-714-528-6777
Fax: 1-714-528-6778
This document was produced by the Moxa Technical Writing
Web: www.moxa.com
Center (TWC). Please send your comments or suggestions
Email: info@moxa.com
about this or other Moxa documents to twc@moxa.com.
Moxa White Paper High Speed Roaming for Better Mobility

Factors that affect the smoothness of roaming include the

topology of the access points, the gain and coverage of the
antennas, and the roaming threshold settings of the client. To
ensure smooth roaming, we first need to take into
consideration the route of the moving object, and carefully plan
the wireless AP deployment configuration.

Basic Roaming
The diagram below illustrates a client moving from left to right
through regions governed by three different APs. As the client
moves, the signal strength of the first AP drops and the signal
strength of the second AP increases. Most commercial wireless
clients only consider communication quality when making
roaming decisions. That is to say, when the signal strength of
the first AP drops and frames cannot be transmitted, the client
in an IEEE 802.11b application will first reduce the
communication speed from 11 Mbps to 5.5 Mbps, and then to 2
Mbps, and finally to 1 Mbps. If the communication quality is still
poor and frame transmission continues to fail, the client will
decide that its time to roam from the first AP to the second AP.

A roaming mechanism of this sort might be able to satisfy

many non-critical applications. However, this type of
mechanism severely impairs the smoothness of data
transmission for video and audio applications, which require
higher quality data transmission.

Copyright 2009 Moxa Inc. Page 2 of 4

Moxa White Paper High Speed Roaming for Better Mobility

Roaming by Signal
One of the most common methods for increasing the roaming
speed is to use what is referred to as roaming by signal, which
only allows roaming when the current APs signal drops below a
certain threshold and roaming to another AP will improve
transmission quality and provide a stronger signal.

In this case, the client constantly scans for the best AP signal
quality and roams only when a particular threshold has been
reached. This can prevent the ping-pong effect, in which
unnecessary handovers take place when the client moves back
and forth between two APs.

Roaming by Channel
The second way to increase the roaming speed is to unify AP
channels to avoid wasting channel hopping time during
roaming. However, a unified channel selection can also cause
interference. Users are advised to properly separate channels
between roaming APs to reduce interference.

Copyright 2009 Moxa Inc. Page 3 of 4

Moxa White Paper High Speed Roaming for Better Mobility

Disclaimer
This document is provided for information purposes only, and the contents hereof are subject to change without

notice. This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor subject to any other warranties or conditions,

whether expressed orally or implied by law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability, or

fitness for a particular purpose. We specifically disclaim any liability with respect to this document and no

contractual obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This document may not be

reproduced or transmitted in any form for any purpose, without our prior written permission.

Copyright 2009 Moxa Inc. Page 4 of 4