A seamless QoS provisioned micro-mobility management scheme

Wireless cellular networks are largely based on circuit switching technology and are optimally tuned to carry voice traffic. Some extensions to these networks such as GPRS are deployed to support data traffic for e-mail and Internet access. Mobile IP is a proposed standard for mobility management in a packet switched technology but lacks quality of service (QoS) provisions and is inefficient for handling micro mobility related issues. RSVP has known strength in dealing with QoS guaranteed session but mobility constraint limits it performance. In this paper a QoS complaint handoff scheme is presented with the major aim of preserving the RSVP session during the mobility by keeping simultaneous binding between two access routers and transferring of QoS state to the new access router using a context transfer mechanism. Handoff latency has been minimized by sensing link-layer triggers and maintaining a soft state of handoff. The proposed mechanism enhances overall handoff performance by optimized utilization of scarce resources in wireless access networks. The proposed scheme is tested in a simulated environment using network simulator-2. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism can sustain traffic streams during mobility and bring significant performance benefits against non QoS complaint solutions.