Reduced cell switching in a mobile computing environment

With the huge growth and the market for laptop and palmtop computer purchases, a rapid increase of mobile usage in the Internet is expected. As mobile nodes move in a wireless computer network, a mobile node must determine when to switch its link-level point of attachment to the wired network. In this paper, we present six cell switching techniques and discuss their attributes. Specifically, we present the Late, Early, and Strong cell switching techniques and three variations of them. We then investigate the performance of these six techniques to discover the best method a mobile node should use to determine when to perform its re-attachment to the wired network.