Copyright © 2008 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers
Regular Section -- Papers -- Network |
A Unified Handover Management Scheme Based on Frame Retransmissions for TCP over WLANs
1 The authors are with the Dept. of Computer Science and Electronics, Kyushu Institute of Technology, Iizuka-shi, 820-8502 Japan. E-mail: kazuya{at}infonet.cse.kyutech.ac.jp, 2 The author is with the Graduate School of Information Science, Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), Ikoma-shi, 630-0192 Japan.
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Abstract |
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In ubiquitous networks based on Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) with limited individual coverage, mobile nodes will be likely to traverse different WLANs during TCP communication. An effective handover management scheme for achieving seamless and efficient communication throughout the handover operation is therefore crucial. To achieve this, the following three requirements are essential: (i) early initiation of handover, (ii) elimination of communication interruption upon handover, (iii) selection of an optimal WLAN. The handover scheme proposed in this study employs frame retransmission over WLAN as an indicator of link degradation, and a handover manager (HM) on the transport layer obtains the number of frame retransmissions on the MAC layer using a cross-layer architecture in order to achieve (i) and (iii). Then, it also employs multi-homing in order to achieve (ii). Simulations demonstrate that the proposed scheme can satisfy all of the three requirements and is capable of maintaining TCP performance throughout the handover operation.
Key Words: wireless LAN, handover, TCP, frame retransmission, cross-layer, multi-homing
Manuscript received May 24, 2007. Manuscript revised October 20, 2007.