Cross layer design to improve the handover latency in multi-homed WLANs

Multi-homed Mobile nodes (MNs) are very likely to traverse several different WLANs at anytime and at any location during communication. Thus, a single voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) application can experience several handovers between WLANs, which the quality of the communication may be degraded due to packet loss. The handover scheme proposed in this paper employs the delay over WLAN as an indicator of link degradation. Handover controller is implemented using a cross-layer architecture, obtains delay information on the media access control (MAC) layer and proceeds to the network layer parameters to deploy an alternative IP network. The application controlled handover reduces packet loss up to 50% during a video data throughout the handover process compared to the network without application controlled handover technique.