Make-without-break horizontal IP handovers for Distributed Mobility Management schemes

There is a new trend to consider Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) for flat network architectures to cope with the increased distributed nature of the mobile networks. DMM improves the routing optimization and reduces the scalability issues when compared with the centralized mobility management, through the traffic anchoring distribution at the Access Routers (ARs). However, the handover optimization, which also demands for fast and soft handovers to reduce/eliminate the handover latency and the respective packet loss, is not properly addressed in the DMM. Although current seamless handover approaches, already integrated in centralized mobility schemes, could also be adapted to the DMM schemes, they introduce new entities/functionalities, messages and buffering/bicasting mechanisms to reduce the handover latency or the packet loss. In this paper, the seamless IP handover is addressed from a novel make-without-break perspective, which is able to maintain two logical connections in the same physical interface with two Access Points (APs) from distinct IP networks. The outcome of the evaluation shows that make-without-break with a DMM scheme is able to reduce or even eliminate the handover latency and the packet loss from link disconnection, providing seamless IP session continuity in mobile environments.