Fast Handoff Method for Mobile IP over Wireless LAN Networks

Hidetoshi YOKOTA  Akira IDOUE  Toru HASEGAWA  Toshihiko KATO  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications   Vol.E85-B   No.10   pp.2108-2116
Publication Date: 2002/10/01
Online ISSN: 
DOI: 
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Issue on Mobile Multimedia Communications)
Category: 
Keyword: 
Mobile IP,  wireless LAN,  fast handoff,  

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Summary: 
In the Mobile IP handoff procedure, mobile node movement is detected from advertisements of foreign agents that differ from previously received advertisement and the new "care-of" address is registered with the home agent. However, user packets are not forwarded to the new foreign agent until a registration is completed and this interruption may degrade the quality of service especially in real-time applications such as audio and video, or may lower the TCP throughput due to retransmission timeout. To tackle these issues, we propose a new low latency handoff method, where access points used in a wireless LAN environment and a dedicated MAC bridge are jointly used to alleviate packet loss without altering the Mobile IP specifications. In this paper, we present design architecture of the proposed method and evaluate its performance in an actual network environment to verify the effectiveness of our approach.