A Seamless Handover Mechanism for IEEE 802.16e Broadband Wireless Access

Handover is one of the most important factors that may degrade the performance of TCP connections and real-time applications in wireless data networks. We developed a loss-free handover scheme called LPM (Last Packet Marking) for IEEE 802.16e-based broadband wireless access networks. By integrating MAC and network layer handovers efficiently, LPM minimizes the handover delay and eliminates packet losses during handover. Our performance study shows that LPM achieves loss-free packet delivery without packet duplication and increases TCP throughput significantly.