Explicit proactive handoff with motion prediction for mobile IP

Mobile IP has been widely accepted, but lacks a fast handoff mechanism. In this paper, we introduce an explicit proactive handoff scheme with motion prediction. Since each user has patterns of movement, a mobile node predicts its future motion and explicitly notifies its old foreign agent which subnet it is likely to handoff to. During a handoff, the old foreign agent duplicates and forwards packets to the predicted subnets. With our scheme, network-layer handoff latency can be reduced to the level of link-layer handoff latency, and the number of packets lost during handoffs is also minimized. With a real network activity trace, we demonstrate that this scheme is able to predict motion accurately, with only a small overhead in bandwidth consumption and computation.