Exploiting Gaps of Real-Time Traffic to Improve Handover Performance in Wireless Networks

The handover mechanism in wireless networks has been intensively investigated in the past years. The traditional solutions are to customize various protocols in different layers to provide uninterrupted communication, which is particularly important for real time traffic. In this paper, we intend to exploit silence gap, inherently existing in realtime traffic, to improve handover performance. The proposed strategy can be appended to most of handover mechanisms without extra overhead. We theoretically analyze the relationship between gap distribution and handover performance under the assumption of different statistical distribution of gaps on a case-by-case basis. Subsequently, we insert an additional module into the WiMAX network and conduct the simulations using real voice traces. The results confirm the analytical conclusions, showing that the gap-exploiting approach can obtain significant gain in terms of packet loss particularly in low-speed mobile environment.