Handoff Mechanisms in Cellular IP: Enhancement into the Indirect Handoff Mechanism

Authors

Abstract

Mobile IP is now the standard for providing wide area mobility to a mobile host but it gives sub-optimal performance for fast moving mobile hosts. Several micro-mobility protocols have been proposed to take care of fast moving mobile hosts which perform frequent handoffs. Cellular IP and HAWAII are two popular micro-mobility protocol solutions that exist in the literature. Cellular IP complements Mobile IP with support for fast, seamless and local handoff control, and IP paging. In this paper a modification to the existing indirect handoff mechanism in Cellular IP is proposed and subsequently assessed by simulation. The approach proposed in this paper, called Enhanced Indirect Handoff, constitutes a new way to handoff to the new base station where the handoff is initiated along the old base station, resulting in reduced handoff delay and hence reduced packet loss for TDMA networks.

Keywords

Wireless Access Network, Micro mobility, Handoff and Cellular IP.

Subject

Wireless Access Network, Micro mobility