Hierarchical handoff schemes over wireless LAN/WAN networks for multimedia applications

The objective of this paper is to study the performance of handoff procedures for an integrated wireless LAN/WAN infrastructure, both qualitatively and quantitatively. We make use of a proposed hierarchical mobility management scheme to evaluate the performance of a handoff procedure with a hierarchy level of one. Also, we propose a design and perform the analysis for a two-level hierarchy architecture that is applicable for integrated 802.11-based WLAN/WAN scenarios. The focus of our analysis is on performance measures that are suitable for real-time multimedia applications. In particular, we observe and analyze the improvement in handoff latencies and packet loss ratios that are obtained by employing hierarchical mobility schemes for UDP based traffic sessions under different network scenarios. We also study the scalability of the proposed schemes by evaluating the impact of the number of mobile nodes on the above performance measures.