Providing seamless mobility with competition based soft handover management

Abstract

As host mobility and radio interference in wireless networks cause packet losses and delays, it is difficult to develop useful mobile real-time media applications. This paper describes a new handover strategy for end-to-end mobility called Competition based Soft Handover Management (CSHM). During a handover, redundant packet streams are sent through multiple connections which are later merged into one stream when received by the other end-point. As each network connection competes with other connections in contributing to the merged packet stream, the handover process can be viewed as a competition. As a proof of concept, CSHM has been implemented in Resilient Mobile Socket, RMS, an application-layer mobility scheme and used together with Marratech Pro, which is a commercially available e-meeting application. By using this prototype, the paper shows that it is possible to minimize redundant packets as well as decrease packet losses during handovers. © EFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2004.