IP-based soft handover in all-IP wireless networks

The growing demand for high-speed wireless access to the Internet is the driving force behind the current trends to design All-IP wireless networks, whose radio gateway and mobile stations use IP protocol for signaling and /or data transport. That will allow a ubiquitous IP-based access by mobile users, with special emphasis on the ability to use a wide variety of wireless and wired access technologies to access the common information infrastructure. The design of an all IP wireless network requires an efficient and flexible handover management, independent of layer 2 protocol. That allows efficient mobiles stations roaming between Access routers. In this paper we propose to analyze current handover approaches in main IP-based mobility protocols in terms of complexity, efficiency, and effect on TCP performances; we discuss number of issues that motivate each handover design. A number of key design choices are identified and exploited from this analysis to present our new IPv6-based soft-handover approach.