Providing seamless communication in mobile wireless networks

This paper presents a technique to provide seamless communication in mobile wireless networks. The motivation behind this study is to find a cost effective solution for minimizing impact of active handoffs (handoffs during an active connection) on connection throughput. Existing solutions either provide total guarantee for seamless communication, incurring heavy network bandwidth usage (multicast based approach), or do not provide any guarantee for seamless communication (unicast based approach). Some other solutions are tuned to give good performance for specific protocols (e.g., fast-retransmit approach). This paper proposes a novel staggered multicast approach which provides a probabilistic guarantee for seamless communication independent of the communication protocol used. We present experimental results of performance improvements achieved by our scheme, for data transfer using TCP over a wireless network in the presence of active handoffs. The conclusions however, are generic in that they apply to protocols other than TCP.