ECHO: A Quality of Service Based Endpoint Centric Handover Scheme for VoIP

Existing terminal oriented handover mechanisms capable of meeting the strict delay bounds of real time applications such as VoIP do not consider the QoS of candidate handover networks. In this paper ECHO - a QoS based handover solution for VoIP- is proposed. ECHO is endpoint centric and does not require any network support; it leverages the SCTP transport protocol. ECHO incorporates network metrics that directly affect VoIP quality into the handover decision process. A dynamic variant of the ITU-T E-Model is used to calculate how the network metrics map to a user perceived voice quality metric known as the MOS. The MOS value is then used to make handover decisions between each of the available access networks. The results show that the addition of the QoS capabilities significantly improves the handover decisions that are made.