Latent Handover: A flow-oriented progressive handover mechanism

The next generation network may be regarded as an IP (Internet Protocol) converged network, combining various access technologies. In this environment, ubiquitous computing and seamless networking are required for the mobile host. The growing availability of multiple network interfaces on mobile devices makes Concurrent Multi-path Transfer (CMT) an appealing candidate to realize the seamless handover. In this paper, we proposed a novel Latent Handover mechanism, which is flow-oriented and switches the traffic to the new path progressively to make the handover process unconscious to users or upper layer applications, especially real-time services. In addition, to support the proposed Latent Handover, the transport layer introduces our proposed cmpSCTP (concurrent multi-path Stream Control Transmission Protocol), which adds concurrent multi-path transfer and dynamic Multi-Path Management support to the standard SCTP for realizing seamless handover. The theoretical analysis verified that the proposed Latent Handover can efficiently optimize the handover process and enhance transmission efficiency during handover. Extensive simulations under different scenarios using OPNET highlighted the superiority of the proposed Latent Handover solution against other existing handover schemes under performance indexes such as throughput, handover latency, packet delay, and packet loss. 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.