Sub-second transport layer vertical handover using mSCTP in android mobile devices

Contemporary mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets are increasingly equipped with multiple network interfaces that enable automatic vertical handover between heterogeneous wireless networks including WiFi and cellular 3G and 4G networks. However, the employed vertical handover schemes are mostly quite simple, and incur non-negligible service disruptions to ongoing sessions, e.g., video streaming and live conferencing sessions. A number of improved mobility management frameworks for these lightweight mobile devices have been proposed in the past recent years. Although these may result in negligible service disruptions, the vast majority of them are network- or integrated network- and link-layer based, and require support in the infrastructure to be successfully deployed. This paper demonstrates the feasibility of using an infrastructure-independent, transport-level vertical handover scheme on a smartphone for an application as demanding as video streaming. In our study, we used a previously developed Android-based mobility framework. The study shows that a standardized mobility solution based on the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) and its extension for Dynamic Address Reconfiguration (DAR), incurs a service disruption on par with comparable proposed network- and link-layer solutions.