Handoff provisioning in Bluetooth wireless personal area networks

In this paper, we propose an efficient packet buffering in layer 2 to improve the handoff performance in wireless personal area networks (WPAN) using Bluetooth technology. By packet buffering in layer 2, the handoff performance can be significantly improved with minimum system overhead and thus better QoS (quality of service) can be given to the mobile WPAN users. The proposed packet buffering method, i.e., HQL2B (handoff QoS layer 2 buffering) is especially useful to the WPAN users who utilize TCP connections. Recently, some methods have been proposed especially for improving handoff performance in Bluetooth WPAN but unlike other works our method can improve handoff performance without any modification of TCP and Bluetooth specification. Through the simulations we show that the proposed method can greatly improve handoff performance in Bluetooth WPAN environment compared to other works.