Implementation Design of Handover Management Scheme for Efficient Multimodal Communication

In the near future, mobile nodes (MNs) need to automatically select an optimal interface based on communication quality in a multimodal environment, that is, multimodal communication. While the existing handover management schemes avoid the communication termination, they can not satisfy (1) seamless communication and (2) selection of an optimal wireless network based on communication quality, and thus its performance during handover is drastically decreased. In our previous work, we proposed a new handover management scheme that employs (a) cross-layer approach and (b) multiple TCP connections to satisfy (1) and (2), and showed its effectiveness through simulation experiments. However, any other existing studies have not yet proposed a handover management scheme that employs both (a) cross-layer approach by exploiting beacon messages and (b) multiple TCP connections, and demonstrated the effectiveness of them on a real system. Thus, in this paper, we describe the implementation design of our proposed scheme in detail, and then show preliminary results for the fundamental performance of the proposed prototype system in a real wireless environment.