Optimized handoff management method considering micro mobility in wireless access network

Abstract

In Mobile IP, mobile hosts must send signaling messages to notify the home network of their movements. This causes an enormous amount of signaling traffic and cannot guarantee registration within a limited latency during handoff. Micro mobility protocols have been proposed to solve these problems. Micro-mobility protocols have fast handoff and paging support characteristics. The bicasting technique can minimize packet losses by using proactive steps that require knowledge of the new access point prior to handoff. However there is a problem that packet transmission time through old and new paths is not synchronized. In this paper, we propose a location database management method for handoff using the bicasting technique. We extend the location database that maintains the time delay between the mobile host and crossover node in a wireless access network. Using the proposed method, we can extremely minimize packet losses and duplicated packets received by mobile hosts during the handoff procedure.