Socketless TCP - an end to end handover solution

The 4G promise of convergence and internetworking has resulted in the emergence of handover management in the research arena. The general trend has been to treat handover as a routing problem, and attacking it at the network layer, by forming some kind of intelligence within this layer. We believe that any intelligence should be kept within the endpoints in support of the end-to-end argument; hence we approach the problem at the transport layer. This paper introduces the concept of socketless TCP; a novel enhancement to the philosophy behind conventional TCP connection association, resulting to a transport layer handover management solution. We compare SL-TCP with MIPv4, MIPv6 with route optimization and migratory TCP, analytically and present results based on handoff delay.