Seamless Handover for Hotspot Network Using Buffered Packet Forwarding Method

We have proposed hotspot network based on layer 2 forwarding for seamless handover. A mobile terminal sends movement notification packet to new access point when the terminal changed connection from previous access point to the new access point. All nodes which received the movement notification packet change address table. The previous access point sends buffered packets to the new access point. We have evaluated performance of the proposed network using network test bench. IEEE802.11a modems were used as wireless interfaces. Measured delay time depending on the buffered packet forwarding was confirmed negligibly small. No packet loss was measured. The degradation of throughput at handover was suppressed to compare with that of conventional method without packet forwarding