Handoff-triggered TCP (hot-TCP): performance and fairness evaluation

When designing Mobile IP, achieving full transparency for higher layer protocols was one of the main design goals. However, this resulted in several weaknesses, one of them being the decline of TCP´s performance in the case of frequent handoffs. Our proposal, handoff-triggered TCP (hot-TCP), enhances TCP´s throughput in that case. After a handoff, TCP is notified about the reconnection and may immediately resume data transmission using the previous window size. Since we may not change the remote hosts on the Internet, hot-TCP is used within a split transport connection architecture. We evaluate hot-TCP regarding its performance and fairness in a multiuser environment. The results presented show that a mobile node using hot-TCP does not impact the fair sharing of the wireless link´s capacity. Furthermore, we discuss the security requirements for our approach.