Smooth handof was introduced in mobile IP to overcome the problem of packet loss during handoff. However, smooth handoff causes packets sequence disruption during packet forwarding procedure which may result in degradation of network performance in higher layer protocol. In this paper, we discuss the impact of receiving out-of-sequence packets by the mobile node on TCP and UDP applications and we propose a technique which minimizes the arrival of out-of-sequence packets to the mobile node. This technique anticipates the forwarding of packets from the current foreign agent to the new one while the mobile node initiates its handoff. To evaluate our solution, we use the unstable time period (UTP) when the packet sequence could be mis-ordered. We show that the unstable time period in our solution is very lower than the unstable time period in classical smooth handoff. Furthermore, we also show that our solution reduces considerably the out-of-sequence packets generated by smooth handoff.
Citation:
D. Tandjaoui, N. Badache, H. Bettahar, A. Bouabdallah, H. Seba, "Performance Enhancement of Smooth Handoff in Mobile IP by Reducing Packets Disorder," iscc, pp.149, Eighth IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications, 2003