Title: Adaptive semi-soft handoff for Cellular IP networks

Authors: Eriko Nurvitadhi, Ben Lee, Chansu Yu, Myungchul Kim

Addresses: School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Oregon State University, 3117 Kelley Engineering Center, Corvallis, OR 97331, USA. ' School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Oregon State University, 3117 Kelley Engineering Center, Corvallis, OR 97331, USA. ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cleveland State University, Cleveland, OH 44115, USA. ' School of Engineering, Information and Communications University, Daejeon, Korea

Abstract: Various advances in technologies have led to a myriad of wireless mobile devices to ubiquitously connect to the internet. This creates a significant demand for seamless wireless network connectivity. The Cellular IP semi-soft handoff protocol has been proposed to satisfy this demand. Studies have shown that it performs better than the conventional hard handoff protocol. However, these studies are based on unrealistic assumptions of symmetrical network topologies and fixed loads. In practice, network topology can be asymmetric and network load fluctuates. Semi-soft handoff uses fixed handoff parameters for stream synchronization and mobile host|s tune-in time, which may work well for the symmetrical network setups, but performs poorly with unbalanced and dynamically changing networks. This paper proposes adaptive semi-soft handoff protocol (Adaptive-SS) to address this issue by dynamically changing handoff parameters based on network conditions during handoff. Our simulation study shows that Adaptive-SS significantly reduces network traffic and packet losses/duplications during handoff, while still minimising handoff latency.

Keywords: fast handoff protocols; micromobility protocols; cellular IP networks; multimedia streaming; wireless networks; mobile networks; semi-soft handoff; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWMC.2007.014451

International Journal of Wireless and Mobile Computing, 2007 Vol.2 No.2/3, pp.109 - 119

Published online: 09 Jul 2007 *

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