Transport Layer Mobility Management across Heterogeneous Wireless Access Networks

Abstract

A transport layer mobility management scheme for handling seamless handoffs between appropriate networks is presented. The future mobile environment will be characterized by multimodal connectivity with dynamic switching. Many technologies have been proposed to support host mobility across diverse wireless networks, and operate in various layers of the network architecture. Our major focus is on the transport protocol that recovers packets lost during handoffs and controls transmission speed to achieve efficient communication. Majority of the existing technologies can maintain the connection by updating the information of a single connection around a handoff. Moreover, none of the studies extensively examine the handoff latencies and focus how an appropriate network is selected, during the handoff. In this paper, we first extensively investigate the various handoff latencies and discuss the limited performance of existing technologies based on the single connection. We then propose a new scheme resolving the problems by the transport protocol enabling the adaptive selection of an appropriate interface based on communication condition among all available interfaces. Finally, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme promptly and reliably selects the appropriate interface, and achieves excellent goodput performance by comparing with the existing technologies.