Cross-layer handoff via predictive multiple pre-registrations for QoS of mobile multimedia applications

To roam between homogeneous or heterogeneous wireless networks, such as prevalent WiFi and 3.5G or emerging WiMAX, a mobility management plays an important role to provide users ubiquitous Internet access and seamless connections. Most of techniques in mobility management focus on shortening the delay of roaming from one wireless domain to another. Pre-registration is one of cross-layer methods to trigger layer-3 handoff before layer-2 handoff to further decrease handoff delay. Pre-registration applies prediction method to forecast next network destination of MN. However, prediction failure will bring a lengthy handoff delay and burst packets loss because MN will perform original handoff scheme in Mobile IP when entering an unexpected network. In this paper, a new mobility management protocol named predictive multiple pre-registration (PMP)* is proposed to increase the success rate of handoff prediction by pre-registering multiple target networks which MN may associate with. Then, the QoS of mobile multimedia streaming can be also improved by PMP due to the reduced packet loss and reduced handoff latency. The performance results from experiments on typical multimedia applications of VoD and VoIP demonstrate that the proposed PMP further improve the QoS of mobile multimedia streaming by the perceptual quality indices of PSNR and MOS values of VoD and VoIP applications respectively.