Performance enhancement of smooth handoff in mobile IP by reducing packets disorder

Smooth handoff has been introduced in mobile IP to overcome the problem of packets loss during handoff. However, smooth handoff causes packets sequence disruption during packets forwarding procedure, which may result in degradation of network performances in higher layer protocols. In this paper, the impact of receiving out-of-sequence packets by a mobile node on TCP and UDP applications is studied and discussed. In addition, a solution to minimise the arrival of out-of-sequence packets to the mobile node is proposed. This solution anticipates the forwarding of packets from the current foreign agent to the new one while the mobile node initiates a handoff. To evaluate this solution, the unstable time period (UTP), when packets sequence could be mis-ordered is used. It is shown that the UTP in our solution is lower than the UTP in classical smooth handoff. Furthermore, it is also shown that this solution reduces considerably the out-of-sequence packets generated by smooth handoff.

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