Semi-Proactive RSVP extension for wireless mobile networks

Mobility and quality-of-service (QoS) management are important tasks for the future development of wireless networks. The RSVP model, which is efficient in resource reservation at the fixed endpoints, becomes invalid under host mobility. In this article we focus on how quality of service guarantees can be provided for the RSVP flows during the handover events. We propose to perform as many operation as possible before the handover but the resources are reserved only after the handover on the effective new data path, in order to avoid their waste. We refer to it as a semi-proactive extension to the RSVP protocol. In order to reduce much more the time used for re-establishing the proper QoS, we propose to buffer at the candidate crossover node - CCRN (an intermediate node on end-to-end data path) the packets directed to the mobile node during the handover. This buffering also guarantees, for the buffered packets, the same QoS treatment of the no-buffered ones