Handoff Performance Comparison of Mobile IP, Fast Handoff and mSCTP in Mobile Wireless Networks

We compare the performance of three handoff protocols, namely Mobile IP, Fast Handoff and mSCTP. Among the three schemes, Mobile IP suffers from the lowest data throughput and longest handoff latency. Fast Handoff can perform better, provided that the mobile node can handoff to the new base station at an appropriate time instant when data forwarding between network routers begins. mSCTP supports multihoming; the mobile node does not need to determine the exact handoff time. Nevertheless, packet reordering and the subsequent fast retransmission degrades its handoff performance. To avoid these problems, adding some flow control operations in the transport layer is necessary. Flow control should be carried out in-sync with the handoff operations. This implies the transport layer should additionally recognise when do the handoff procedures start or finish. We therefore come up with a natural choice in designing a handoff scheme, which is to centralise the handoff and flow control operations in the transport layer.