To transfer or not to transfer – Service handovers in wireless LAN systems with imperfect movement estimation

Abstract In today's networks, mobile terminals may be provided with advanced services. In order to avoid re-initialization from scratch after a handover, the so-called context of these services may either be transferred to the new Wireless LAN access point, or the respective data stream may be forwarded from the service instead. However, committing context transfers for fast terminals infers unnecessary expenses, the same is true for slow nodes with respect to the forwarding method. In this paper, we compare a default decision strategy to the theoretical optimum – that would require perfect prediction of the time to the next handover – as well as to the performance that can be reached with a certain inaccuracy of the prediction.