An application-quality-based mobility management scheme

Experimental results are presented for end-point controlled handover of a stream of voice-like packet data traffic between two independent wireless networks. The handover was achieved by using a version of the stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) that had been modified to monitor link quality and switch the primary connection to the ldquobestrdquo quality link available, where quality is evaluated in terms of application performance. The results clearly show that mobility management based solely on received signal strength is not suitable for wireless systems with contention-based access policies such as WiFi.