SUPPORTING MICRO-MOBILITY WITH MULTI PROTOCOL HANDOFF MECHANISM

In this paper, we examine micro-mobility protocols, and present a distributed handoff and mobility mechanism for IP micro-mobility, combining the strengths of the Cellular IP and Hawaii IP protocols. The enhancement consists of a modified handoff mechanism, allowing the mobile node to perform handoff at an appropriate time with the more efficient choice of handoff scheme, as a function of the signal strength of the access points. The results show that the proposed mechanism improves both the throughput and the handoff delay by 50% compared to the Cellular IP and Hawaii IP protocols. A T-test analysis shows that this improvement is significant at the 99% confidence interval.