To satisfy both the bandwidth efficiency of low-speed mobile hosts (MHs) and seamless handoff of high-speed MHs in cellular networks, this paper proposes a reservation scheme which exploits a dynamic two-tier cell structure and the handoff probability. The dynamic two-tier cell structure determines the reservation and non-reservation zones according to the speed of MHs. The handoff probability is calculated using the moving speed and the direction of MHs.

This paper analyzes the limitations of the multihoming support in the Proxy Mobile IPv6 protocol, then proposes an enhanced multihoming support scheme based on a per-interface address configuration method. The proposed scheme can provide a more flexible multihoming support and also maintain application session continuity during a handoff between two interfaces by using IPv6 extension headers. Plus, flow distribution with filters is also used to realize the advantages of multihoming. Simulation results with the OPNET validate the proposed multihoming support scheme for convergent networks.

Due to the dynamics of topology and resources, Call Admission Control (CAC) plays a significant role for increasing resource utilization ratio and guaranteeing users' QoS requirements in wireless/mobile networks. In this paper, a dynamic multi-threshold CAC scheme is proposed to serve multi-class service in a wireless/mobile network. The thresholds are renewed at the beginning of each time interval to react to the changing mobility rate and network load. To find suitable thresholds, a reward-penalty model is designed, which provides different priorities between different service classes and call types through different reward/penalty policies according to network load and average call arrival rate. To speed up the running time of CAC, an Optimized Genetic Algorithm (OGA) is presented, whose components such as encoding, population initialization, fitness function and mutation etc., are all optimized in terms of the traits of the CAC problem. The simulation demonstrates that the proposed CAC scheme outperforms the similar schemes, which means the optimization is realized. Finally, the simulation shows the efficiency of OGA.

In this paper, a channel allocation scheme is studied for overlay wireless networks to optimize connection-level QoS. The contributions of our work are threefold. First, a channel allocation strategy using both horizontal channel borrowing and vertical traffic overflowing (HCB-VTO) is presented and analyzed. When all the channels in a given macro-cell are used, high-mobility real-time handoff requests can borrow channels from adjacent homogeneous cells. In case that the borrowing requests fail, handoff requests may also be overflowed to heterogeneous cells, if possible. Second, high-mobility real-time service is prioritized by allowing it to pre-empt channels currently used by other services. And third, to meet the high QoS requirements of some services and increase the utilization of radio resources, certain services can be transformed between real-time services and non-real-time services as necessary. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed schemes can improve system performance.

Vertical handoff is a new type of handoff that is triggered when a mobile node moves over heterogeneous wireless networks with each proving different access bandwidth, transmission latency, and coverage. A mobile node can achieve higher throughput by accessing a higher bandwidth providing wireless network. However, TCP has to experience drastic changes of the bandwidth and the latency due to the vertical handoff which must be recognized as a network congestion, and this degrades end-to-end performance. In this paper, we propose a TCP context switching scheme, named Context-Switching TCP, that maintains TCP variables separately for different types of wireless networks. Through simulations, Context-Switching TCP shows higher performance than TCP SACK for vertical handoff. Especially, it shows much higher performance gain when vertical handoff occurs frequently.

IEEE 802.11 wirelesses LANs (WLANs) have been rapidly deployed in enterprises, public areas, and households. Voice-over-IP (VoIP) and similar applications are now commonly used in mobile devices over wireless networks. Recent works have improved the quality of service (QoS) offering higher data rates to support various kinds of real-time applications. However, besides the need for higher data rates, seamless handoff and load balancing among APs are key issues that must be addressed in order to continue supporting real-time services across wireless LANs and providing fair services to all users. In this paper, we introduce a novel access point (AP) with two transceivers that improves network efficiency by supporting seamless handoff and traffic load balancing in a wireless network. In our proposed scheme, the novel AP uses the second transceiver to scan and find neighboring STAs in the transmission range and then sends the results to neighboring APs, which compare and analyze whether or not the STA should perform a handoff. The initial results from our simulations show that the novel AP module is more effective than the conventional scheme and a related work in terms of providing a handoff process with low latency and sharing traffic load with neighbor APs.

This letter proposes a vertical handoff scheme for integrated WLAN and UMTS that use the mobile Internet Protocol (IP) to reduce the packet loss caused by the ping-pong effect for high mobility users. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme efficiently increases the throughput of high mobility users.

A transport layer mobility management scheme for handling seamless handoffs between appropriate networks is presented. The future mobile environment will be characterized by multimodal connectivity with dynamic switching. Many technologies have been proposed to support host mobility across diverse wireless networks, and operate in various layers of the network architecture. Our major focus is on the transport protocol that recovers packets lost during handoffs and controls transmission speed to achieve efficient communication. Majority of the existing technologies can maintain the connection by updating the information of a single connection around a handoff. Moreover, none of the studies extensively examine the handoff latencies and focus how an appropriate network is selected, during the handoff. In this paper, we first extensively investigate the various handoff latencies and discuss the limited performance of existing technologies based on the single connection. We then propose a new scheme resolving the problems by the transport protocol enabling the adaptive selection of an appropriate interface based on communication condition among all available interfaces. Finally, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme promptly and reliably selects the appropriate interface, and achieves excellent goodput performance by comparing with the existing technologies.

In this letter we investigated the packet transmission control in downlink CDMA cellular systems. The downlink packet transmission control scheme based on the soft handoff status was proposed to enhance the system performance. The proposed scheme controls the downlink packet transmissions by employing a transmission window which is individually resolved to each mobile station according to its propagation condition and soft handoff status. Computer simulation shows that compared with the conventional scheme the proposed scheme improved the delay performance and fairness of service in packet reception.

In CDMA cellular systems, the frequency reuse factor equals one. Therefore, the soft-handoff technology with combining macroscopic diversity was introduced to enhance the link performance. In this work, a novel macroscopic diversity combining scheme is proposed to enhance the link performance of the forward-link. The basic concept of this scheme is to integrate error correction coding into the soft-handoff technology. According to the number of soft-handoff channels, the source information is encoded by a convolutional code with a lower code rate. The coded symbols are then equally distributed to all channels from different BSs to the MS, and each channel carries a disjointed set of coded symbols. For this proposed scheme, no extra transmission power or bandwidth is required. The only cost is a slight increase of the encoding and decoding complexity of the convolutional codes. Numerical and simulation results show that a performance gain of 1 dB in bit energy-to-total noise power density ratio can be obtained as compared with the conventional scheme in the same conditions.

Providing multimedia services with a quality-of-service guarantee in mobile wireless networks presents more challenges due to user's mobility and limited bandwidth resource. In order to provide seamless multimedia services in the next-generation wireless networks, efficient call admission control algorithm must be developed. A novel borrowing-based call admission control policy is proposed in this paper as a solution to support quality-of-service guarantees in the mobile multimedia wireless networks. Based on the existing network conditions, the proposed scheme makes an adaptive decision for bandwidth allocation and call admission by employing attribute-measurement mechanism, dynamic time interval reservation strategy, and service-based borrowing strategy in each base station. We use the dynamically adaptive approaches to reduce the connection-blocking probability and connection-dropping probability, and to increase the bandwidth utilization, while the quality-of-service guarantees can be maintained at a comfortable level for mobile multimedia wireless networks. Extensive simulation results show that our proposed scheme outperforms the previously proposed scheme in terms of connection-blocking probability, connection-dropping probability, and bandwidth utilization, while providing highly satisfying degree of quality-of-service in mobile communication systems.

We describe a new characteristic of soft handoff, call failure when a mobile moves from the handoff region to the normal region, and introduce the metric of region-transition failure probability to more accurately assess the performance of CDMA systems that support real-time video streaming services. This characteristic has not been considered in previous research. Simulations show that this failure must be considered since it significantly degrades system performance.

In this study, we propose an adaptive handoff scheme with dynamic hysteresis value for cellular communications, which is based on distance between the mobile station and the serving base station. Performance is evaluated in terms of the expected number of handoffs, the expected handoff delay, standard deviation of handoff location, and the expected link degradation probability as well. Numerical results and simulations show that the proposed scheme outperforms the handoff schemes with static hysteresis levels. The effect of distance error is also discussed.

Vertical handoff is required to achieve anywhere and anytime internet access in the fourth generation (4G) network providing interoperability between universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) and wireless LAN (WLAN). However, video data can be lost due to latency caused by vertical handoff. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose a video streaming technique supporting error concealment (EC) for video on demand (VOD) services that provides seamless playout at the client in vertical handoff. In the proposed method, the streaming server first predicts the client buffer status (CBS). Using the predicted CBS and the channel rate, the streaming server selects a proper video transmission method for vertical handoff between frame selective pre (FSP)-transmission and re-transmission. Performance evaluations are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

The guard channel scheme in wireless mobile networks has attracted and is still drawing research interest owing to easy implementation and flexible control. Dynamic guard channel schemes have already been proposed in the literature to adapt to varying traffic load. This paper presents a novel control-theoretic approach to dynamically reserve guard channels called PI-Guard Channel (PI-GC) controller that maintains the handoff blocking probability (HBP) to a predefined value; while it still improves the channel resource utilization.

In wireless ATM mobile communication environments, an abrupt increase in the number of mobile users in a specific base station (BS) will overload the BS and turn it into a so-called hot-spot cell, which causes an unbalanced traffic load condition if the traffic load in the neighboring BSs is light. In order that efficiently allevates to utilize a limited bandwidth, it is necessary to use a good mobile handoff strategy to alleviate unbalanced traffic load condition. This paper proposes a complete traffic shedding algorithm (CTSA) for soft handoff efficiently to alleviate the overloaded traffic in a hot-spot cell by adjusting handoff parameters, which virtually reduces the service coverage of the heavy loaded BS without adjusting the transmission power. Mobile terminals (MT) located in the outer area of the hot-spot cell will be handed off early to the neighboring BSs with light traffic load; and MTs in the neighboring BSs will not be handed off to the hot-spot cell, so that the traffic load of the hot-spot cell can be decreased. After analyzing the proposed algorithm and comparing the other methods, variable threshold soft handoff (VTSH) and enhanced soft handoff (ESH), by simulation, the performance of CTSA is better than the others. CTSA obviously increases system throughput and decreases soft handoff call dropping ratio, new call blocking ratio, and total call refusing ratio.

We propose an efficient and practical seamless handoff scheme for 4G mobile systems based on IP and OFDM. The seamless handoff scheme obtains the physical channel for handoff in a contention-free manner with pre-synchronization and pre-forwarding IP contexts. As a result, it thoroughly decreases the physical channel blocking time as well as IP layer context-switching time to minimize total handoff delay.

Our previously proposed orthogonal code hopping multiplexing (OCHM) [1],[2] scheme is designed to accommodate a large number of bursty downlink users. However, it may undergo link quality degradation due to symbol perforations occurring when all code-collision symbol values are not identical. In this letter, a group-level random codeword hopping-pattern allocation (GRCHA) scheme is proposed to produce fewer symbol perforations than the previous symbol-by-symbol random codeword hopping (SRCH) of OCHM [1]. The proposed GRCHA scheme combined with the spatial filtering capability of switched-beam array antennas (SBAA) is expected to significantly reduce the symbol perforation probability in the OCHM scheme, and inter-beam softer handoff is applied to cope with high symbol perforation probability for users in overlapping beam areas of SBAA. The performance is evaluated by theoretical analysis and simulation in terms of the average symbol perforation probability. The proposed GRCHA scheme yields better performance than the SRCH scheme and the dedicated codeword allocation scheme, and the diversity gain of inter-beam softer handoff mitigates the effect of high symbol perforation probability for users in the overlapping beam areas.

When a mobile node that subscribes to one or more multicast groups moves to another subnet, it is essential to provide a network level multicast handoff mechanism. Previous multicast handoff schemes are based on Mobile IP. However it is known that the Mobile IP is not adequate to interactive multimedia applications such as voice over IP or video conferencing due to its large handoff delay. Additionally, few researches have paid attentions on multicast handoff in infrastructure-mode WLAN environment. This paper proposes a fast inter-subnet multicast handoff method in Mobile IP based infrastructure-mode IEEE 802.11 WLAN environment. We introduce a dedicated Multicast Access Point (MAP) that works with an access points specified in standard IEEE 802.11 WLAN in order to alleviate disruption of receiving multicast datagram. Unlike previous research, our scheme does not modify Mobile IP specifications. MAP detects the completion of link-layer handoff, sends unsolicited IGMP Membership report to its local router on behalf of the mobile station and performs unicast tunneling. We evaluate the proposed method using ns-2 simulation. The simulation result shows that the proposed method can reduce the disruption period due to inter-subnet multicast handoff to about 1/12 and the packet loss rate can be reduced to about 1/4 over 20-size multicast group compared with the standard Mobile IP based IEEE 802.11 WLAN.

In this paper, we propose an architecture for the MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching)-based micro-mobility management including label switched path setup, packet forwarding, handoff processing, and paging. In order to prevent packet loss during handoff, we propose two packet recovery mechanisms, namely: buffer time-based packet recovery and medium access control (MAC) layer assisted packet recovery schemes. Simulation results show that the MAC layer assisted packet recovery scheme has a better performance than buffer time-based scheme. Our proposed scheme provides a higher throughput when compared with other IP micro-mobility protocols including Cellular IP, HAWAII, and Hierarchical Mobile IP.