Novel approach for shipboard antenna handover without data loss

Shipboard antenna handover causes loss of demodulator synchronization, bit count integrity, frame timing, and cryptographic synchronization as well as TCP throughput degradation. This paper describes a novel approach for mitigating the effects of antenna handover which prevents data loss while minimizing handover processing delay. Ship-to-shore handover uses data buffers in the ship and shore modems, and shore-to-ship handover employs interleaving combined with minimal overhead handover encoding. The proposed technique works with any modulation and FEC coding (or no coding) schemes. The only control signal required is a handover signal at the shipboard modem to indicate the start of handover.