A simulation study of IP-based vertical handoff in wireless convergent networks
The advances in wireless networks and IP technologies has brought ubiquitous access to all-IP information into reality. For wireless IP services, IP-based handoff is a critical issue to the performance of application-level services. Although mobile IP (MIP) and its extensions, as network layer solutions, have been proposed as de facto standard, transmission throughput degradation due to packet loss, registration delay, and transport layer blocking are unavoidable because of MIP handoff mechanisms. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of a transport layer handoff approach, mobile stream control transmission protocol (mSCTP), and compare it with that of a network layer solution, MIP, mSCTP is based on stream control transmission protocol (SCTP), which is the third general purpose transport layer protocol from IETF. We investigate the use of mSCTP for seamless vertical handoff without any change in IP protocol stack by its multi-homing feature and dynamic address reconfiguration (DAR) extension. We evaluate the performance of mSCTP and MIP by introducing handoff delay, end-to-end transmission throughput, and packet loss, and verify our observations by a simulation study of the two protocols in UMTS/802.11b integrated networks using NS-2 network simulator. Copyright (C) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
handoff mobile ip heterogeneous wireless networks umts/wlans