A fast handoff scheme for IP over Bluetooth

A lot of people use a cell phone, PDA, and laptop computer in their daily lives. Bluetooth which enables incompatible devices to communicate with each other over a wireless link can speed up the growth in popularity. BLUEPAC(BLUEtooth Public ACcess) is designed to support IP over Bluetooth and provide users with access to a public network such as the Internet. Our work is motivated by the need for a fast handoff in BLUEPAC A mobile device experiences frequent handoffs due to the short radius of the piconet which is about 10 m. A handoff requires a connection establishment between a mobile device and a new base station which is is a time-consuming procedure in the frequency hopping system. This situation may cause many connection losses which hurt the network performance as a result. We present a new scheme for improving the handoff performance. The basic idea is that a base station controller helps a mobile device to establish a connection to new base station by giving their addresses and clocks. Simulation results show that our scheme significantly reduces handoff delay and imposes a very light overhead on the base station.