adaptive end-to-end mobility scheme for seamless horizontal and vertical handoffs

Mobility management constitutes one of the most significant task to be investigated for Next Generation Mobile Networks (4G). Motivated by connectivity facilities and flow control offered at the transport layer, a number of Stream Control Transmission Protocols (SCTPs) based mobility schemes have been proposed to handle this important issue. However, these proposals are hindered by drawbacks such as unnecessary handoff delays incured by horizontal handoffs. Moreover, the throughput measured immediately after a handoff is affected quite considerably by spurious retransmissions due to failed Selective Acknowledgment messages (SACKs) and data retransmission lost. This paper proposes a new Hierarchical Transport layer Mobility protocol (HTM) that deals with local and global mobility and improves throughputs during the handoff period. HTM exploits the dynamic address reconfiguration feature of SCTP and introduces an Anchor Mobility Unit (AMU) in order to complete more efficient handoff procedures. Simulation and numerical results reveal that HTM guarantees lower handoff latency and packet loss, good throughput and limited signaling load compared to mSCTP (mobile SCTP) based mobility