Practical performance evaluation of VoWLAN handover based on frame retries

In the near future, wireless local area networks (WLANs) will overlap to provide continuous coverage over a wide area. In such ubiquitous WLANs, a mobile node (MN) freely moves between WLANs with different IP subnets during VoIP communication. However, existing methods cannot sufficiently maintain VoIP quality during handover due to changes of IP address and inappropriate execution of handover. To solve these problems, in our previous paper, we proposed and implemented a seamless handover method employing multi-path transmission and a handover trigger based on frame retries. However, we have not sufficiently shown the effectiveness of our proposed method in a practical environment. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on the two features of our proposed method, i.e., frame retries and multi-path transmission, and present a detailed evaluation of our proposed method in a real environment.