When a Mobile IP handoff occurs, the packets in flight can be lost because they are tunneled based on out-of-date location information. In this paper, we propose an enhanced handoff protocol that achieves no packet loss during Mobile IP handoff over a...
When a Mobile IP handoff occurs, the packets in flight can be lost because they are tunneled based on out-of-date location information. In this paper, we propose an enhanced handoff protocol that achieves no packet loss during Mobile IP handoff over a wireless LAN. Our handoff protocol predicts the next foreign agent that a mobile host is to visit by using the information from the data link layer of wireless LAN. After that, when a Mobile IP handoff occurs, the current foreign agent forwards the packets destined to a mobile host to the predicted foreign agent which buffers them. This eliminates packet loss and reduces the packet forwarding delay. Our handoff protocol is simulated using the Network Simulator-2 (ns-2) and shows the substantial performance enhancement of TCP with much less overhead up to 6.2 times compared to standard Mobile IP.