A fast adaptation mechanism for TCP vertical handover

In this paper we propose a vertical handover mechanism for TCP to deal with the delay and bandwidth change during the handover. The proposed mechanism relies on the interaction between the sender and the receiver during the handover and requires no a prior information of the new path. The adaptation is triggered by a handover notification at the receiver and finishes in about two round-trip time. Furthermore, it solves the problem of packet reordering and spurious retransmission timeout as well which are also common during vertical handovers. Simulation results show that our mechanism improves TCP performance in various vertical handover scenarios.